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The saints

St. John of God

A soldier and bookseller locked in a madhouse, who came out and founded a hospital.

Feast: 8 March · 1495 to 1550 · Reformation and missions · Granada, Spain

Read the story 1 min read
Marble statue of St. John of God carrying a sick man, in front of an arcaded building.

Giovanni Dall'Orto, 2008. Wikimedia Commons, Attribution.

Home / The saints / St. John of God

Granada, Spain, 1537

John was a shepherd, a soldier and a bookseller, and in his forties he still hadn’t found his place.1

Then he heard St. John of Avila preach in Granada and broke down in public, so wildly that he was locked in an asylum.1

There he saw how the mentally ill were beaten and neglected, and he decided to care for the sick himself.

Patron of hospitals and the dying1; the sick, nurses and heart patients1; booksellers and printers1

01St. John of God

A house for the sick

He rented a house and filled it with the sick and poor, begging in the streets to feed them.1

His helpers became the Brothers Hospitallers, and Pope Leo XIII later named him patron of hospitals and the dying.2

02St. John of God

Into the river

He died after jumping into a river to save a drowning boy, on his own birthday.1

Live it this week

Visit someone with mental illness

John saw the mentally ill treated like animals and changed it. This week, reach out to someone who struggles with depression or mental illness: call, sit with them, or bring them food, without trying to fix them.

Notes

How we know · 2 sources for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint John of God”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org
  2. Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “St. John of God”. New Advent edition. newadvent.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.