Saint John of God

John of God was born in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal, on March 8, 1495, and the first half of his life looks nothing like the second. He left home as a boy, worked as a shepherd, then as a soldier of fortune across Europe, then as a bookseller in Granada. He was past forty and had no direction. The change came in 1537, in Granada, as he listened to John of Ávila preach. The shock was so violent that people took him for a madman and locked him up in the hospital for the insane, where the patients were kept in line with beatings — that was the method of the time. He came out with the idea that filled the rest of his life: that the sick and the poor must be cared for, not punished. He opened a house in Granada and began taking in those nobody else wanted: the sick, the homeless, abandoned women. He went around the city begging for them, and the words he called out have stuck to the name of his friars in Italy — fate bene, fratelli, “do good, brothers.” Hence Fatebenefratelli. He died in Granada on March 8, 1550, on his birthday. The Order of Brothers Hospitallers was born after him, from the companions he had gathered along the way. He was canonized in 1690, and he is the patron of hospitals, the sick and those who care for them. If your name is John or Joan, today is your name day — even though many wait for June 24, the feast of John the Baptist.