St. John of God (1495-1550)

If today wasn’t a Sunday, we’d be celebrating the Feast of St. John of God (1495-1550). Nonetheless, this oft-overlooked saint deserves some attention. Shepherd, soldier, inmate in an insane asylum, bookseller, founder of a religious order, John Cuidad packed a lot of living into fifty-five years. Born in Portugal, as a young man he became a solider and pretty much put aside religion altogether, but by age forty he had a conversion experience so intense that he was placed in the sixteenth century equivalent of a psychiatric hospital. After he got out of the hospital, he founded a house in Granada where he tended to the needs of the sick poor. His reputation for holiness grew, and one day a child gave him the name by which he was became known, John of God. It was twenty years after his death that his followers founded the Brother Hospitallers, now known as the Brother Hospitallers of St. John of God. Charged with accusations of keeping immoral characters under his roof, he said: “The Son of Man came for sinners, and we are bound to seek their conversion. I am unfaithful to my vocation because I neglect this, but I confess that I know of no bad person in my hospital except myself alone, who am indeed unworthy to eat the bread of the poor.”