Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / St. John of God — The Man Who Lost Everything Twice and Built a Hospital With What Was Left
Transcript
- : A man is being beaten in an asylum. He is not there because he hurt someone. He is not there because he is dangerous. He is simply there because he gave too much away. That is where this story begins. And by the time we get to the end, this same man will have built something that is still saving lives in 53 countries today. Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. We have spent the last three weeks talking about a fisherman who failed and was restored, a slave girl who suffered and refused to become bitter, and a wealthy merchant's son who walked away from everything he owned and ended up one of the most beloved figures in human history. This week, we are again going somewhere completely different. This week's saint is almost completely unknown outside of Catholic circles. Most people have never heard his name, and that is a shame because His story is one of the most raw, honest, complicated, and ultimately extraordinary things I've come across in again researching this show. His name was John of God, and I want to warn you upfront, his life before his conversion is not pretty. He was not a good man for most of his adult life. He was a soldier who abandoned his faith, lived violently, and caused harm. I am telling you this because it matters. because the distance between who he was and who he became is the whole point. This is the story of Saint John of God. We are starting in Portugal. The year is 1495. A boy is born into a small town called Montemor-Unovo, a quiet, modest place in the Portuguese countryside. His parents are middle class, devoutly religious, and by all accounts, loving. His name is Joao Sadade. He is their only child. Now picture that family for a moment. A mother and father who prayed together, who raised their son in the faith, who poured everything they had into this one boy. He is eight years old. He is healthy and happy and loved. And then one day he is gone. The historical accounts are not entirely clear on the details. Some say he was deliberately kidnapped by a stranger, a dishonest clergyman of some kind who had been given hospitality in the family home, who then tricked the boy and took him away. Others say he simply followed someone and got lost. What is clear is that he disappeared completely, crossing the border from Portugal somehow into Spain and never made it home. Now think about what that morning must have looked like for his parents, the searching, the asking, the waiting, the slow, terrible realization that he was not coming back. His mother died of grief shortly thereafter. Her only child had been taken from her and her heart broke so completely that she did not survive it. His father, destroyed by the loss, eventually joined a Franciscan monastery. In the space of one terrible morning, a happy family was erased. And the eight-year-old boy who caused it, without meaning to, without understanding what was happening, found himself homeless and alone on the streets of a foreign country, speaking a language that was barely his own. He would not see Portugal again for over 30 years. Somehow the boy survived. Children are remarkably resilient when survival is the only option. He was eventually taken in by a prosperous shepherd in Spain, a decent man who treated him kindly, gave him work, gave him a home of sorts, and educated him. For years John worked the hills as a shepherd, quiet work, lonely work, plenty of time to think about the family and the home he had lost. He grew into a capable, strong, reportedly handsome young man. The shepherd liked him so much, he offered him his daughter's hand in marriage and his entire inheritance. It was a very generous offer, a genuinely good life laid out on a table in front of him. And John said, no. And at age 22, he did what restless young men with no roots and nothing to lose have done in every century of human history. He joined. the army. For the next 18 years, John fought as a foot soldier in the army of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He fought against the French in Fontarabia. He fought against the Turks in Hungary. He marched through mud and slept on frozen ground and watched men die in ways that no amount of time fully erases. And so, he became someone his eight-year-old self would not have recognized. The biographies are honest about this. John did not emerge from 18 years of soldiering with his virtue intact. He abandoned the faith of his childhood. He drank, he plundered. The gentle boy who had grown up in devout Portuguese household became a man who lived by the brutal logic of military life. You take what you can, you survive at any cost, and you numb what needs to be numbed. He became in his own later description, a man whose conscious occasionally troubled him, but who kept going anyway. There is something painfully relatable about that sentence. How many of us have lived there, knowing something is wrong, feeling the occasional pull of the conscious, and choosing not to look at it too directly because looking at it would require changing? That was John. for nearly two decades, a man moving away from himself one year at a time. There were two moments that cut through the noise. The first, he was left to guard a pile of military treasure, and when his shift ended, much of it had been stolen. He had not taken it, but he had failed to guard it. He was suspected of theft, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to death. He was stripped and prepared for execution. Then, at the last possible moment, another soldier intervened. A senior officer stepped forward and took responsibility. The sentence was commuted. John walked away from the scaffold alive, shaking, with no explanation for why he was still breathing. The second, wounded in battle, cut off from his unit, lying in enemy territory, with no way out. He did something he had not done in years. He prayed. Not a formal prayer, not a memorized one. Just a desperate, terrified man on the ground calling out to the Virgin Mary because there was nobody else to call. He survived that too. Both times he survived something that should have killed him. Both times he noticed it. And both times he went right back the life he was living. Because knowing you should change and actually changing are two completely different things. And John was not yet ready. When his regiment was finally disbanded, John was in his late 30s. He had spent nearly two decades in the army. He had no family, no home, no country that felt like his own. He decided to go back to Portugal to find his parents, to close the circle that had been left open for 30 years. And he found an uncle who told him what had happened. His mother, dead of grief, weeks after he disappeared. His father, a Franciscan monk, and then also dead. The house he grew up in, gone. The family he had spent... 30 years carrying somewhere in the back of his mind, erased completely. Now, I want you to sit with that for a moment. Imagine spending 30 years as a wandering soldier, sustained in part by the idea that someday, someday, you would go home. That there was a mother somewhere that remembered you. That there was a father who had not forgotten the boy who disappeared. And then discovering but they had both died. That is the weight John carried back across the border into Spain. He settled eventually in the city of Granada. He was in his early 40s. He sold religious books from a small stand, quiet work, a clean trade, a man trying to put himself back together one day at a time. He read the books he sold. He began to pray again. He was, by most accounts, genuinely trying to find his way back to something. And then one day he went to hear a preacher. The preacher's name was John of Avila. He was one of the most powerful religious voices in 16th century Spain. A mystic, a scholar, a man whose words had a documented tendency to dismantle people completely and leave them changed on the other side. John walked into that church a bookseller, trying to get his life together. He walked out? Well, he did not exactly walk out. What happened next is one of the most remarkable scenes in the history of the Saints covered so far. And I want to paint it for you as clearly as I can because it is easy to simply read about it quickly and miss how extraordinary it actually was. John of Avila preached about the mercy of God, about what God could do with a broken life, about the weight of sin and the possibility of redemption, and something in John, all of it, the kidnapping, the dead mother, the scaffold, the battlefield prayers, the 30 years of living badly, the guilt he had been carrying like a stone in his chest, something. And all of that broke open simultaneously. He began to weep, not quietly, loudly, uncontrollably. He fell to the ground. He started crying out for mercy, shouting in a church in front of everyone. He beat his chest. He tore at his clothes. He ran out into the streets still crying and fell to his knees in the mud. And then he started giving things away. Everything he had. His coat, his shoes, whatever money was left in his pockets. He pressed it into the hands of anyone he passed. He was running through the streets of Granada weeping and shouting and distributing everything he owned. And the people watching him had one unanimous reaction. They thought he had lost his mind. They were not entirely wrong about what they were seeing. Something had broken open in John that looked From the outside, exactly like madness. And in 16th century Spain, the response to public madness was straightforward. They took him to an asylum. The asylum John was committed to was called the Royal Hospital of Granada. Now, I need you to understand what that meant back in 1538. Because it was nothing like what the word hospital suggests to modern ears, to you and me. It was a place of confinement. The prevailing medical theory of the time held that mental illness was best treated through physical suffering. That beating patients, restraining them, exposing them to extreme cold or heat would somehow shock them back to sanity. This was not considered cruel. It was considered medicine. John was beaten daily. The same man who had survived battle, a scaffold, and 30 years of a soldier's life was now being beaten by attendants in a hospital who believed they were helping him. And here's the detail that stops me. John of Avila, the preacher whose sermon had started all of this, came to visit him in the asylum. He had heard about the man whose breakdown in the street had followed his sermon. He came to see for himself. He sat with John, he listened to him, and then he said something that cut through everything. He told John that his suffering was genuine, that his grief was real, that his desire for redemption was legitimate, but that God did not need him to destroy himself, no. God needed him to do something useful. Get up, John, stop punishing yourself. Go and do something with this. John walked out of that asylum a changed man, not fixed. No, nobody comes out of something like that fixed, but directed, pointed, with the specific burning clarity of a man who has been given one more chance and knows exactly what he needs to do with it. The people of Granada began calling him John of God, not as a title, no. not as a formal name, just as way of describing what they saw when they looked at him. A man who had lost everything, broken completely in the street, been beaten in an asylum, and come out the other side belonging entirely to something larger than himself. John of God. That is who he was from this moment forward. John returned to the streets of Granada, but he was looking at those streets differently now. He saw the sick lying in doorways, the mentally ill wandering without shelter, the poor dying in the gutters with nobody to carry them anywhere, the people that the rest of the city had organized its life around not seeing. And he started picking them up, literally picking them up. He would find a sick person in the street, lift them onto his own back. and carry them to wherever he was living. He begged for food and brought it back. He bandaged wounds. He sat with people who were dying alone and made sure they did not die alone. He was doing this with nothing. No money, no institution, no support system. Just a man in his 40s with a broken past, but yet a clear present. Carrying the sick through the streets of Granada, on his back. Now picture what that actually looked like. John getting up before dawn and walking the streets looking for people who had slept in doorways. Finding a man too sick to stand and lifting him, actually physically lifting him and carrying him back to wherever John was living that week. Going out again, coming back with another person, going out again. He begged for food in the market and brought it back. He tore up his own clothing for bandages when he had nothing else. He nursed wounds. He had no training to nurse. He sat with people who were dying alone in the dark and made sure that they were not dying alone. He smelt like the streets. He was exhausted all the time. He had no idea what he was doing beyond the immediate. This person needs food. This person needs warmth. This person needs someone to tell them they matter. Well, the Archbishop of Granada noticed, and rather than dismiss him, he helped. John was given a house, a real one, not a doorway or not a borrowed room, a building where the sick could actually be brought and cared for. John threw himself into it completely. He begged in the streets for supplies. He recruited volunteers. He organized. He cleaned. He administered. The man who had been beaten in an asylum for his own breakdown was now building the first organized hospital for the mentally ill in the history of Spain. Think about that. The treatment he had received, the beatings, the restraints, the theory that suffering was medicine, had showed him exactly what not to do. He built a place that was the opposite. Food, warmth, dignity, priests. available for the dying, care that treated patients as people rather than problems to be subdued. One night, a fire broke out at a nearby hospital. John ran in. He carried patients out one by one through smoke and flames. Then he climbed onto the roof and began throwing burning beams clear of the building to stop the fire from spreading. The witnesses described it as impossible. A man moving through fire without being burned. Whether you take that literally or not, what is undeniable is that he went in when everyone else ran out. That was John of God. That was always John of God. John died on March 8, 1550, his 55th birthday. He had been ill for months. worn down by years of physical labor, exposure, and the relentless demands of a man who could not stop working as long as someone out there needed his help. His friends had been begging him to rest. He could not rest. A few weeks before his death, a young man fell into a flooding river near Granada. John jumped in without hesitating. He saved the man, but the cold water and the exertion pushed his already failing body past the point it could recover from. He developed pneumonia. He died kneeling before the altar in his own hospital chapel, his face pressed against a crucifix. The people who were with him said he had been praying quietly for a very long time and then simply stopped. He was 55 years old. He had been doing his actual life's work for roughly 13 years, 13 years. from the asylum to his death 13 years. And in that time, he had built the foundation of what would become the Brothers Hospitallers, an order that today operates in 53 countries, runs over 300 hospitals, and employs more than 40,000 people. Just 13 years. All right, back on the porch, sweet tea is in hand. I have been sitting with John of God's story for roughly about three and a half weeks. And the thing I keep coming back to is not the hospital. It is not even the fire. It is the asylum. Well, specifically this. The thing that got John locked up and beaten was not weakness, no. It was the moment his carefully constructed internal defenses finally gave way and something real came through. The grief he had been carrying for 30 years, the guilt, the weight of a life he was not proud of, the desperate need for something to matter. That breakdown in the street was not the problem, it was not. That breakdown was the beginning of everything good that happened afterward. I think a lot of us are walking around carrying things that need to break open. Now, not break us. break open. There is a big difference. We have learned to keep it together, to function, look fine. I know I have. To carry the weight of things we have done and the things that have been done to us without letting anyone see it on our face. John of God fell apart in the middle of a public street in Granada in 1538. It was humiliating. It was messy and it was completely out of control. and it was the best thing that ever happened to I'm not suggesting you run through the streets crying, but I am asking you to consider what you are holding together that maybe needs to come apart a little. What grief you have been managing so efficiently that you have never actually felt it. What guilt has been sitting quietly in your chest for years because you have been too busy or too scared to look directly at it. John of Avila's words to John in the Asylum are still true. God does not need you to destroy yourself. He needs you to do something useful. But you cannot get to the useful part until you deal with the thing you have been carrying. So, the practical challenge for this week is simple, but not easy. Find a quiet moment in the car before bed, wherever, and let yourself feel one thing you have been managing instead of feeling. You do not have to perform it. You do not have to tell anyone. Just stop holding it together for five minutes and just see what is actually there. You might be surprised what gets built on the other side of it. And now it's time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for John of God. Thank you for a story that does not start well and does not pretend otherwise. Thank you that you waited for a man who spent 40 years getting it wrong and then used the next 13 years to change 53 countries. For everyone listening who is carrying something that they have never put down, the guilt, the grief, The version of themselves that they are not proud of? Remind them that the breakdown is not the end. No, that sometimes the thing falling apart is the beginning of the thing being built. And for anyone who is sitting with someone in their own asylum right now, someone whose pain looks like madness from the outside, give them the wisdom of Jhana Vila. Sit with them. Listen. and then point them towards something useful. We love you, even when the path looks nothing like what we expected. Amen. One more thing before we go. John of God is the patron saint of hospitals, nurses, the sick and dying, the mentally ill, heart patients, and, because of his years selling books on the streets of Granada, booksellers and printers. He is also the patron saint of people struggling with alcoholism, which given his own history as a soldier, makes a certain kind of sense. He is also, because of that night in the burning hospital, the patron saint of firefighters. Think about that list for a moment. The sick, the mentally ill, the dying, alcoholics, firefighters, the people who run toward burning buildings and the people who feel like they are in one. The man who was beaten in an asylum became the patron of everyone the world finds hardest to help. That's episode four of Everyday Saints. If John's story hit you somewhere, share it. Just one person. Someone who might need to hear that the thing falling apart in their life might be the beginning of something being built. Leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely helps other people find the show. Next week, a name you likely know, a story you think you know, and a mother who prayed for 17 years without giving up. We are going to tell it I'm John O'Connor, thanks for sitting on the porch with me, and I will see you next week.