14 July 1987
Avila, Spain

My dear Sisters,

St. Vincent would say that it is the Providence of God that has brought it about that I should be celebrating Mass this evening in one of the many hospitals in the world where St. Vincent's Daughters are to be found. Today is the feast of St. Camillus de Lellis, and it was in 1930 that Pope Pius XI proclaimed him, along with St. John of God, patron of all who work in hospitals.

It was just two years before St. Vincent was born that St. Camillus dedicated himself to working in one of the hospitals in Rome. The hospital is still there today but it is a very different place from what it was in the sixteenth century. St. Camillus himself had no medical or nursing qualifications. When he started to work in the Roman hospital, he decided that he would do the most humble and simple tasks which would make the patients more comfortable. He brought to his work no profound skills, but as he left his own small house each day, he brought with him a heart that was centered on God and on the love which he found in Christ Jesus. Soon he was joined by a few other volunteers and in that way was born the Congregation which still lives in the Church today and which has for its apostolate the care of the sick and of the dying. St. Camillus lived to see his Congregation grow, but he himself had to carry the cross of misunderstanding, caused by some of his own confreres and by authorities outside his Community. He was living in Rome when St. Vincent visited there as a relatively young priest, and so one wonders if the two priests ever met. We do not know, but we do know that the two Saints shared the same fundamental vision, namely, that Jesus Christ lives in the poor and the suffering, and that in serving the suffering we draw very close to Christ and Christ to us.

Hospitals are very different places today from those which our Founders knew. In Spain as in other western countries, the State is assuming more control of hospitals. More and more religious Sisters are less in evidence in hospitals of the modern state. Because the modern state commands great financial resources, hospitals can purchase equipment which would be beyond the means of a religious Community. That is a gain. But the withdrawal of Sisters from hospitals, however inevitable it may be, is a loss to the sick.

We can never forget, or should never forget, that the patients of the twentieth century are essentially no different from those of the seventeenth century. Every patient in a hospital is a displaced person, and displaced persons are lonely persons. Behind every patient's eyes there is a world of loneliness and fear. It was so in the time of our Founders and it is so today. A Daughter of Charity who is a nurse can offer her professional skills to patients, but the greatest gift which she can bring to any patient is love, assurance, understanding, tenderness and a capacity to enter into that world of fear and anxiety in which a hospital patient lives. These are gifts which she receives from the compassionate Christ with Whom she must be in daily contact through the Eucharist and reflective prayer. St. Vincent and St. Louise might be puzzled by all the science of our modern hospitals, if they were to come back today. St. Louise especially would have to revise radically all those remedies which she used to suggest to St. Vincent in his illnesses. But our Founders would not have to change a syllable of the advice which they gave on the subject of showing tenderness and love to all who were sick and suffering, particularly the poor.

To you, my very dear Sisters, who work in this hospital, St. Louise, were she addressing you tonight, would not change a word in a sentence which she wrote in a letter to a Sister who was working in a hospital in Nantes: "My dear Sister, your great trials and mental turmoil in all this confusion do not arise so much from the uncertainty of events, opposition and conflicting reports, as from the fact that you have no one reliable to comfort you and give you advice. But, please believe me, my dear Sister, if I were in your place, I would ask God to grant me a great spirit of indifference and the realization that it is not up to us to act in this situation; rather I would ask Him to put us in the disposition to listen and to endure all that it said for or against us so that none of it troubles us." (Spiritual Writings of Louise de Marillac, ltr. 284, p. 320).