MIRACULOUS MIRACLES^™

Prayer — Prayers of the Saints

Prayer to St. Camillus of Lellis

Indulgenced by Leo XIII, 27 February 1894

To the soldier and gambler who lost everything at cards and spent the next forty years nursing the incurables of Rome — patron of the sick, of nurses, and of hospitals.

The Prayer

English · Original

Glorious St. Camillus, special protector of poor sick people, who for forty years, with a charity truly heroic, didst devote thyself to alleviating their spiritual and corporal miseries; be pleased to succour them still more generously, now that thou art happy in Heaven and that they have been confided by the Church to thy powerful protection.

Obtain for them from God either that they may be healed of the evils from which they are suffering, or that by patience and Christian resignation they may be sanctified and strengthened in the hour of their death; and obtain also for us the grace to live and die, after thy example, in the practice of divine love. Amen.

Our Father. Hail Mary.

When the Prayer is Said

On 14 July; at a sickbed; by nurses, doctors and hospital chaplains; in an epidemic.

History & Background

Camillus de Lellis was a mercenary soldier, six foot six, with a violent temper and a gambling habit that left him at one point begging in the streets of Naples, having lost even the shirt off his back. An incurable sore on his leg took him to the hospital of San Giacomo in Rome, first as a patient and then as a servant. What he saw there — the dying handled by hired attendants who robbed them, and occasionally buried them alive — changed his life.

He founded the Ministers of the Sick, whose members wear a red cross on the habit and take a fourth vow to serve the plague-stricken even at the risk of their lives. They went onto battlefields at Canizza in 1595, the first recorded military field ambulance unit in history. Leo XIII named him, with St. John of God, patron of the sick and of hospitals in 1886, and Pius XI patron of nurses in 1930.

The prayer asks for the sick exactly what a good nurse would ask: either that they be healed, or that by patience and Christian resignation they be sanctified and strengthened in the hour of their death. Leo XIII indulgenced it in 1894; the text is the Raccolta's of 1910.

Indulgences Attached

Two hundred days, once a day — Leo XIII, 27 February 1894 (Raccolta, 1910, no. 348).

Related Saints

St. Camillus de Lellis

May 25, 1550, Bucchianico, Abruzzo – July 14, 1614, Rome

All Prayers