St. John of God

Who they were

John was Portuguese, a shepherd, then a soldier who spent twenty years in campaigns and lived accordingly. Past forty, selling books in Granada, he heard John of Avila preach and broke down so completely, publicly, dramatically, that he was committed to an asylum. What he experienced there, the beatings and chains that passed for treatment, decided the rest of his life. On his release he rented a house and began taking in the sick and the mad and nursing them himself, begging food for them in the streets at night. Out of that house grew the Brothers Hospitallers, who run hospitals on every continent today. He died at fifty-five after diving into a flooded river to save a drowning man; the illness that followed finished him.

Why people turn to St. John of God

A man who was a psychiatric patient before he was a founder of hospitals. Heart patients took him later, from the manner of his death and the iconography of his burning heart; people carrying mental illness have the older claim.

How to ask their intercession

Name the diagnosis without embarrassment, he heard worse said about himself. Ask his prayers for the person, and for the nurses and aides doing the unglamorous work he did. ---