4. Lessons to be Drawn from the Works of Mercy
A simple sample of how Christianity practiced the works of mercy provides lessons of how these patterns of rescue and incorporation were above all urgent, responsive acts to those most in need. Significantly, these were corporate practices with strong institutional expressions and they incorporated the most shamed. Above all, they empowered the people they welcomed, not treating them as objects of beneficence but as siblings in the Lord.
For instance, often the least became greatest, with the person being ministered to becoming in time the head of the project. For instance, the motto of the lay Order of the Holy Spirit founded in the thirteenth century by Guy de Montpellier was: “The sick person is the head of the household; those who assist are the servants in the household.” These apostolates, with their unexpected leadership policies, were extraordinarily successful. At its height, the order had founded and staffed in Europe some 800 hospitals. One of them, the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, still stands in Rome, a few hundred yards from St. Peter’s Basilica.[21]
One of the results of the extraordinary upheaval created by the Crusades was the rapid spread of what today we call sex work. After the Crusades, sex workers were without funds and shelter. By the end of the twelfth century, houses of refuge were established in Bologna, Paris, Marseilles, Messina, and Rome. In turn, some of these sex workers themselves became sponsors of hospitality. Founding the Congregation of the Penitents of St. Mary Magdalen (1225), these women established more than fifty houses throughout Europe providing community life for their members and shelter for sex-workers in need. One cannot imagine that everyone thought the Congregation was morally acceptable. For many it would have been scandalous. Still, in many instances these sex workers became heads of the apostolates.[22]
In the twelfth century The Hospitallers of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, founded in 1120, were composed mostly of knights infected with leprosy who administrated and protected the leprosarium there. With an outbreak of an epidemic of leprosy in the twelfth century, any knight contracting the disease entered the ranks of the order. Their capacity to administer the Jerusalem leprosarium extended to those elsewhere. By 1265, Pope Clement IV decreed that local clergy should ensure that all leprosaria were under the administration of the Hospitallers. These were not centers of shame, but rather sanctuaries for those whose contagious disease required them to live apart from others. Still these communities were found throughout Europe and the Near East and were well known for society’s responsiveness to those with Hansen’s disease.[23]
Of the hundreds of confraternities dedicated to the works of mercy,[24] one of the most famous were those that cared for those with syphilis. In 1497, the Compagnia del Divino Amore (Confraternity of Divine Love) was founded in Genoa in 1497 by Chancellor of the Republic Ettore Vernazza as a group of laity and clergy committed to working for those suffering from shame: the poor, the prostitute, and the syphilitic. Victims of syphilis, having been abandoned both by their families because of shame and by hospitals because of fear of contagion, found a welcome in the confraternity’s “Ospedali degli incurabili” (Hospitals for the Incurables).
In 1499, they built the first hospital in Genoa. In 1517, the confraternity built the “Hospital of Mercy” in Verona. Shortly thereafter, Gaetano went to Vicenza to reorganize the “Hospital of Mercy” there to serve the syphilitic. In 1521, the Ospedale degli incurabili was opened in Brescia. In 1522, Gaetano opened an enormous facility in Venice that today stands as the headquarters of Venice’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Also in 1522, a Confraternity chapter was founded in Padova, and within four years they opened their hospital for syphilitics. In 1572, a hospital opened in Bergamo and in 1584 another in Crema.
Of all the Ospedali, probably the most remarkable is the one founded in 1510 by Saint Gaetano da Thiene, who built the hospital for pilgrims arriving in Rome. One can only imagine the horrendous experience of those with syphilis arriving in Rome, ostensibly with other pilgrims, fearing rejection and stigma and a horrible death, but then encountering the hospitality of the Hospital of the Incurables at the Church of Saint James on the Via Flaminia, only a few hundred feet from the city of Rome’s main gate at the Piazza del Popolo. These structures were built to last: today, 500 years later, the building still stands as an obstetrics hospital bringing new life into the eternal city.[25] We see from these historical examples that the mercy of God in Jesus Christ has always been and continues to be a summons to all Christians, one heeded and fulfilled by clergy, religious orders, and lay people. Today we are likewise called to become communities of hospitality that practice mercy as inclusion and empowerment, in both personal and social relationships.
[21] P. de Angelis, Guido di Montpellier, Innocenzo III, e la fondazione dell’Ospedale Apostólico di Santo Spiritu in Santa Maria in Saxia (Rome: Nova Tecnica Grafica, 1962).
[22] Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (London: Pimlico, 2005), 170 ff.
[23] Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt, Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
[24] It is important to appreciate that confraternities from the fifteenth through to the present had two basic movements. First, they brought together interested parties to to some form of prayerful community; second, out of that community they adopted a work of mercy. On the work of confraternities, indispensable are Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Nicholas Terpstra, Cultures of Charity. Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Terpstra,Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[25] Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, I devoti della carità. le confraternite del Divino Amore nell’Italia del primo Cinquecento. Vol. 98. (Naples: Città del Sole, 2002); Mario Fois, “La Risposta confraternale alle Emergenze sanitarie e sociali della prima metà del Cinquecento Romano. Le Confraternite del Divino Amore e di S. Girolamo della Carità,”Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 41 (2003) 83-107.