Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini, Hosanna in Excelsis, part thirty-nine

President Donald John Trump was sold a bill of goods by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prior to the onset of the joint American Israeli aerial bombing of the Islamic Republic of Iran on February 28, 2026. Trump bought Netanyahu’s pitch that a military strike on Iran’s top leadership would demoralize Iran’s military forces and provide the impetus for a popular rebellion. Fresh from his success capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro eight weeks previously, Trump really believed that a quick strike in Iran would bring about the sort of success he had realized in Venezuela.

As we know, of course, the Iranian leadership’s hatred of the United States of America is deep-seated for many reasons, especially because of this country’s slavish support for the murderous policies of the Zionist State of Israel. Even leaving Mohammedanism aside for the moment, the Persian mind is entirely different from Donald John Trump’s fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants decision-making that he thinks will intimidate the Iranian leadership into seeing things his way.

President Donald John Trump does not understand that the Iranian Mohammedans are willing to endure long periods of suffering in the belief that they can win a war of attrition with him, who is so mercurial as to make one threat one day before changing his mind the next. The Iranian leadership, having witnessed Trump’s mind-numbing contradictory threats, most of which he does not carry out, do not fear American military might, which is why they are not going to give much credibility Trump’s threatening “bridges and power plants day” again as he had done on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, two days before he announced the beginning of a ceasefire:

President Trump on Tuesday warned the US will pummel Iran until “I say it’s enough” and that “energy targets” are next in his ramped-up war effort.

“I’ll save the energy targets for last, but ultimately we’ll hit energy targets,” Trump told Fox News reporter Trey Yingst in an interview on the stepped-up military operation.

“We’re going to hit them very hard tonight. We’re going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very hard the night after, and then next week it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants,” Trump said.

“We’re going to hit them very hard tonight. We’re going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very hard the night after, and then next week it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants,” Trump said.

“Next week comes the bridges. We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

The escalation in rhetoric is reminiscent of Trump’s ominous Easter warning, in which he threatened to bomb Iranian infrastructure on “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day” if the “crazy [expletive deleted] running the country didn’t “Open the [expletive deleted] Strait.”

The president had given the regime an April 7 deadline to open the Strait of Hormuz, further warning that “a whole civilization will die” if Tehran refused. 

The tough talk produced a short-lived, two-week cease-fire that Tehran agreed to on the deadline Trump set. 

The president’s latest threat to expand the list of US military targets in Iran came as the US forces battered coastal parts of the country for a fourth consecutive day.  

The airstrikes, along with the reimposition of a US Naval blockade on Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz, are part of the president’s effort to apply pressure on the regime to agree to a peace deal and abide by its terms. 

“The only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength, and the only strength is military strength, and that’s what we’ve done,” Trump told Yingst. 

The president later likened Iran to a “great boxer” who needs to be “beat up” some more before submitting.

“It’s like a great boxer. You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot,” Trump said.

“They have some fight left, but they don’t have much.”

The president asserted US forces are “beating them up really badly” and blamed escalating tensions on the fact that the Iranian government has “some bad ones in there — some very bad ones in there — and I think they’re the ones that are stopping a deal.”

When asked whether seizing Kharg Island – a critical Iranian oil export hub in the Persian Gulf – was possible, Trump indicated it was “unlikely” but not off the table. 

“I think it’s unlikely,” Trump said, adding: “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that.” (Trump says US will 'knock out' Iran's power plants and bridges next week — unless regime makes a deal.)

Well, President Trump has ordered strikes on some bridges in southern and central Iran and appears to ready to target the power plants as well if the Iranian leadership does not give him the “deal
that he wants. What the President does not realize is that Iran has fought asymmetric wars in the past, which is how they forced the American-funded and armed Iraq under Saddam Hussein into a stalemate during their ten-year war from 1980 to 1988:

War is not checkers. It is chess, a game that began in India and was refined and carried through Persia, where "shah" meant king and "shah mat" meant the king was helpless. The language matters because strategy, whether in chess or war, is not only about placing an opponent in check. It is about knowing how to finish the game.

President Donald Trump holds the stronger pieces, and Tehran knows it. That is why Iran is not trying to match America move for move. It is trying to widen the board before Washington decides how to close the game.

Tehran's counter-move

The pattern is now familiar. Trump strikes Iranian military targets. Iran pressures commercial shipping. Trump tightens the maritime noose. Iran threatens new energy routes. Each American move is answered not by matching American firepower, but by shifting the pressure somewhere else: at sea, in oil markets, across Gulf capitals and inside Washington's political debate.

U.S. Central Command has confirmed a fresh wave of strikes on Iranian coastal defense and missile sites, part of an effort to reimpose a naval blockade on Iranian ports and degrade Tehran's ability to threaten Hormuz shipping. Iran answered with strikes on U.S.-linked targets in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, and with cruise-missile strikes that killed and wounded mariners aboard tankers in the strait. Tehran is trying to make each American strike produce a wider problem.

The Tanker War's lesson

During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Tehran helped turn the Persian Gulf into a battlefield in what became known as the Tanker War. The U.S. Navy launched Operation Earnest Will to escort reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through the Gulf. In April 1988, the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine while on that mission. Four days later, the Navy answered with Operation Praying Mantis, sinking or damaging a significant portion of Iran's operational navy in a single day.

Iran did not defeat the U.S. Navy. It learned something else: mines, tankers, shipping lanes and oil anxiety can force a far stronger power to defend much more than a single waterway. That habit has not changed.

The Strait of Hormuz remains the central square on today’s board. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that oil flow through Hormuz averaged roughly 20 million barrels a day in 2024, about a fifth of global petroleum consumption.

But Hormuz may no longer be the whole board. Reuters reports that Iran is signaling it could use its Houthi allies in Yemen to threaten the Bab el-Mandeb gateway to the Red Sea, putting a second vital energy artery at risk. Closing Bab el-Mandeb would force tankers around southern Africa, adding time and cost to global energy shipments.

A one-chokepoint crisis is dangerous. A two-chokepoint crisis becomes a test of American staying power.

The toll mistake

Washington also handed Tehran an argument it did not deserve. Trump floated a 20% fee on shipping through Hormuz, then dropped the idea a day later, saying no one should be able to charge such a toll. The legal problem was obvious. The U.N.'s International Maritime Organization said there is no legal basis for mandatory tolls on an international strait under transit-passage rules.

America cannot credibly tell Iran it has no right to toll an international waterway while briefly weighing a toll of its own. Even withdrawn, the proposal was an unforced error.

The larger danger is that repetition becomes a substitute for strategy. Axios reports that Trump convened a Situation Room meeting to weigh an offensive wider than the current strikes near Hormuz, and Trump has said publicly that strikes on Iranian power plants and bridges could follow if Tehran does not return to the table.

Force works when it narrows an enemy's options. It fails when it multiplies America's obligations. Tehran is betting that every American strike, threat and widened blockade will look like progress while adding another place Washington must defend.

What Trump should do now

Trump should refuse that bet. Three disciplines would help him do it.

First, stop making maritime policy in public. A major maritime policy should not reach a social media post before its legal basis, allied support and enforcement mechanisms are settled.

Second, name the war America is actually fighting. Is this limited retaliation, a maritime-security operation, coercive nuclear diplomacy or an effort to dismantle Iran's coercive infrastructure? Each answer requires different targets, different limits and a different explanation to the American people.

Third, use force to narrow the war, not expand it on Tehran's terms. American power should shrink Iran's options, not multiply Washington's burdens.

Trump should refuse that bet. Three disciplines would help him do it.

First, stop making maritime policy in public. A major maritime policy should not reach a social media post before its legal basis, allied support and enforcement mechanisms are settled.

Second, name the war America is actually fighting. Is this limited retaliation, a maritime-security operation, coercive nuclear diplomacy or an effort to dismantle Iran's coercive infrastructure? Each answer requires different targets, different limits and a different explanation to the American people.

Third, use force to narrow the war, not expand it on Tehran's terms. American power should shrink Iran's options, not multiply Washington's burdens.

The Tanker War offers a caution. What began as a limited escort mission became a test of national will, alliance management and escalation discipline. Washington cannot afford timidity. It also cannot afford carelessness.

Iran cannot defeat the United States directly, and it does not have to. Its strategy is to widen the board, raise the cost and strvive long enough to call endurance a kind of victory. 

Trump holds the stronger pieces. He has put Iran in check more than once this year. But check is not checkmate. A regime under pressure can still escape, counterattack and drag the fight into a costlier configuration if its opponent mistakes movement for strategy.

Trump has the pieces to prevail. What he needs now is the discipline to prevent Tehran from choosing the next square. (Iran can't beat America outright. It can still make Trump play its game.)

This is all very well and good except for the fact that Donald John Trump launched an unjust, immoral and unconstitutional war without any clearly stated goals that he believed would be achieved within a matter of days. He has publicly announced his strategies, threatened various outcomes without carrying through on most of the threats, and said repeatedly that the Iranian leadership was “begging for a deal.”

This mess—and it is nothing other than a mess—was premised upon the entire false premise that Iran “was within weeks of developing a nuclear weapon” and at a time with the strategically important Strait of Hormuz was entirely open as an international waterway. The only real accomplishment in this unjust war lacking a genuine casus belli is that Iran has made the Strait of Hormuz, not its nuclear program that Trump said had been “obliterated” thirteen months ago, the focal point of the conflict, which in itself was a strategy that forced the government of the United States of America to fight on its terms while Americans and others in the world continue to pay the price of increased energy costs, which Trump assured us was “a small price to pay” to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon that it was nowhere near having in the first place.

Meanwhile, of course, the Israelis have continued their genocidal program in Gaza, invaded and occupied southern Lebanon while destroying  residential dwellings and infrastructure that had nothing to do with the Hezbollah terror group that has exercised a de facto control over southern Lebanon for decades, invaded Syria to engage in military operations there, and permitted illegal Israeli “settlers” to commit violence and steal the property of Palestinians, both Christians and Mohammedans, in the West Bank:

Palestinians fight fires after settler attacks in the occupied West Bank

Overnight Israeli settler attacks set farmlands ablaze in Masafer Yatta and burned vehicles near Tulkarem, as Palestinian villages across the occupied West Bank continue to face a growing wave of settler violence and land loss. (Palestinians fight fires after settler attacks in the occupied West Bank.)

Several Palestinians have been injured in separate attacks across the occupied West Bank amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reports.

A 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot in the chest by Israeli forces in Bani Naim, east of Hebron, on Thursday, according to Wafa. He was taken to hospital and is in a stable condition.

Israeli settlers beat a 30-year-old man in Abu Njeim, southeast of Bethlehem. He is receiving treatment at a nearby hospital.

Elsewhere, settlers attacked several members of the same family in Khirbet Emneizal in the South Hebron Hills.

The assailants also stole the family’s sheep before Israeli forces arrived, assaulted residents and arrested seven people.

Attacks by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank have surged since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in 2023. Critics say settlers have become emboldened by the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable for its siege of the enclave.

Last month, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Israeli settlers had attacked Palestinians or their property six times a day on average so far this year – the highest rate on record.

Citing figures from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Media Office, the Anadolu news agency reported that Israeli forces arrested 32 people across the occupied West Bank on Thursday. Thirteen were in the town of Beit Ummar, north of the city of Hebron.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is “deeply alarmed” by Israel granting city status to the illegal settlement of Givat Ze’ev in the occupied West Bank.

His spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told a news conference that Israel’s administrative designation “does not alter Givat Ze’ev’s legal status under international law as part of the occupied Palestinian territory”.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion ordering Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories “as rapidly as possible”, declaring its presence unlawful.

Although the opinion is not legally binding, it has increased pressure on Israel to abandon its expansionist policies. The court also said that other states are obliged not to recognise the occupation as lawful or aid or assist in maintaining it. (Palestinians injured in Israeli settler attacks across West Bank.)

Although President Donald John Trump may seethe privately about the Israeli government’s immoral and illegal policies while occasionally criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu publicly, he has done to defend the 1993 Oslo Accords that the Israelis are violating daily in the West Bank nor has he done anything of substance to denounce the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its destruction of much of southern Lebanon.

This mess is entirely of Trump’s making, starting with his decision to agree to Netanyahu’s idea of striking the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he lacks any ability to admit that he was wrong and that he precipitated a worldwide energy crisis while putting the Gulf States in the crosshairs of the Iranian military on an almost daily basis.

Do you think for one moment that Donald John Trumps knows anything about Our Lady’s Fatima Peace Plan or about how her Most Rosary was decisive in aiding the Christian fleet to defeat the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571?

What more is there left to say?

How very far we are from the time when rulers governed according to the mind of Christ the King and engaged in warfare as a last, not a first, resort to protect the rights and liberties of Holy Mother Church, which is why I think that it is useful to review how Saint Henry the Emperor used warfare to advance the cause of the Holy Faith and thus of the temporal and eternal good of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem:

Several barbarous nations of Sclavonia and other neighboring territories made inroads into some portions of the Empire, doing great damage to the inhabitants and sparing neither churches nor convents, but plundering and laying waste everything in their way. They ravaged the diocese of Merseburg, and the holy emperor, advised by the nobles of the land, marched against them. Girding around his loins the sword of the holy Martyr St. Adrian, he called on the Lord of Hosts to be with him, and then begged his holy patrons, especially the holy Archangel Michael, St. Gregory and St. Adrian to intercede for him. He further promised to St. Lawrence, the patron of the See of Merseburg, to renew the church that had been dedicated to him, and which had been destroyed by the idolatrous people, if he would obtain from God the grace to vanquish them. His whole army was prepared for the battle, by receiving the Holy Communion, and when the morning broke, the Emperor beheld the barbarians marching against him in immense masses. Having again called on God for aid, he encouraged his soldiers to fight bravely against the enemies of the country and religion. When the battle began, the holy Emperor perceived those Saints whose aid had been invoked, at the head of his army, strengthening his soldiers and causing such panic among the enemy, that most of them fled and others turned in wild rage against each other. Thus did the Almighty renew the miracle, which, in ancient times, He had wrought for the benefit of His people, and the holy Emperor won a complete victory for which he gave due thanks to heaven and fulfilled the promise made in honor of St. Lawrence.

Valiantly as the holy Emperor marched against the enemies of his land and the Holy Church, on this occasion, he was equally ready, at other times, to spare those who humbled themselves and requested peace. The inhabitants of Troja in Calabria had rebelled against the general of the Emperor, and the latter was obliged to punish them for it, in order to prevent others from following their expample. Hence he besieged Troja with his army. When the inhabitants saw that they could not oppose the imperial power, they sent all the children in a long procession to the Emperor, crying "Lord, have mercy." So touching a cry, accompanied by floods of tears, went to the Emperor's heart, and withdrawing his army, he announced to the people of the city his pardon, with the words, that it would be wrong for him, as a man, to disregard prayers and tears which oftentimes moved even God. Surely a beautiful example of Christian charity, far from all desire to seek revenge on those who gave offence. The same charity actuated the holy Emperor to assist the poor and needy, and to stretch forth his hand to help the oppressed. His love to the Almighty he manifested especially by his zeal to further His honor on all occasions. To this end he erected many magnificent churches and convents, on which he spent large sums of money. There can hardly be named a monarch, who renewed and erected so many churches, endowed so many dioceses, and founded so many convents as this holy Emperor. (St. Henry, Emperor.)

The Mohammedans and the Zionists are filled with hatred for each other and Donald John Trump is blind to any recognition of First and Last Things, which is why the precepts of the Just War Theory mean nothing to him because, as he himself said six months ago, “he hasHis “Own” Morality in His Own Mind.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ really meant it when He said that “Without me, you can do nothing” and there will never be a genuine peace into the Middle East or elsewhere in the world everyone is converted to the true Faith and is thus ready to exclaim:

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dóminus, Deus Sábaoth. Pleni sunt cæli et terra glória tua. Hosánna in excélsis. Benedíctus, qui venit in nómine Dómini. Hosánna in excélsis.

Pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary for the "peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ."

On the Feast of Saint Camillus de Lellis

Saint Camillus de Lellis was a saint who was "made" by God directly after a life of sin. He was a headstrong, heartless young boy who was cruel to other children. He threw a rock at a girl who told him that she was going to report his bad behavior to her parents, telling her, "Good. You can tell them about this, too!" before launching his projectile. He caused great heartache to his saintly mother, who prayed the same kind of copious tears that Saint Monica had said for her wayward son, Augustine.

There was a difference, though: Saint Augustine lived a life of wanton pleasures before he was baptized while Saint Camillus de Lellis had had the benefit of infant Baptism. Camillus de Lellis simply rejected the graces that God sent to him through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, preferring his disordered will to the love of God. There was another difference: Saint Camillus's bad behavior brought his mother to an earthly death while he was yet a young boy. This made it possible for her, purged of whatever self-love and faults she possessed, to pray for her more purely and perfectly from eternity than she ever could while on the face of this earth. It was those prayers from our saint's mother, no doubt, that caused God to intervene directly in his life.

Camillus de Lellis gambled so much that he quite literally lost the shirt off his back once. He would engage in fisticuffs at the drop of a hat. God had to intervene directly in his life to change it as Camillus de Lellis, despite all his terrible sins that were driven by his pride and his anger and his greed, had been a chosen soul all along although no one looking at him prior to God's direct intervention would have known that this was so. Perhaps it wise for me to "get out of the way" in order to let Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., paint the picture with his exquisite perfection as his introduction takes us to the account of the saint's life as found in The Roman Breviary: 

The Holy Spirit, who desires to raise our souls above this earth, does not therefore despise our bodies. The whole man is His creature and His temple, and it is the whole man He must lead to eternal happiness. The Body of the Man-God was His masterpiece in material creation; the divine delight He takes in that perfect Body He extends in a measure to ours; for that same Body, framed by Him in the womb of the most pure Virgin, was from the very beginning the model on which ours was formed. In the re-creation which followed the Fall, the Body of the Man-God was the means of the world's redemption; and the economy of our salvation requires that the virtue of His saving Blood should not reach the soul except through the body, the divine sacraments being all applied to the soul through the medium of the senses. Admirable is the harmony of nature and grace; the latter so honours the material part of our being that she will not draw the soul without it to the light and to heaven. For in the unfathomable mystery of sanctification, the senses do not merely serve such as a passage; they themselves experience the power of the sacraments, like the higher faculties of which they are the channels; and the sanctified soul finds the humble companion of her pilgrimage already associated with her in the dignity of divine adoption, which will cause the glorification of our bodies after the resurrection. Hence the care given to the very body of our neighbour is raised to the nobleness of holy charity; for being inspired by this charity, such acts partake of the love wherewith our heavenly Father surrounds even the members of His beloved children. I was sick, and ye visited Me, our Lord will say on the last day, showing that even the infirmities of our fallen state in this land of exile, the bodies of those whom He deigns to call His brethren, share in the dignity belonging by right to the eternal, only-begotten Son of the Father. The Holy Spirit, too, whose office it is to recall to the Church all the words of our Saviour, has certainly not forgotten this one; the seed, falling into the good earth of chosen souls, has produced a hundredfold the fruits of grace and heroic self-devotion. Camillus of Lellis received it lovingly, and the mustard-seed became a great tree offering its shade to the birds of the air. The Order of Regular Clerks, Servants of the Sick, or of Happy Death, deserves the gratitude of mankind; as a sign of heaven's approbation, angels have more than once been seen assisting its members at the bedside of the dying.

The liturgical account of St. Camillus' life is so full that we need to add nothing to it:

Camillus was a born at Bachianico, a town of the diocese of Chieti. He was descended from the noble family of the Lelli, and his mother was sixty years old at the time of his birth. While she was with child with him, she dreamt that she gave birth to a little boy, who was signed on the breast with a cross, and was the leader of a band of children, wearing the same sign. As a young man he followed the career of arms, and gave himself up to a time of worldly vices, but in his twenty-sixth year he was so enlightened by heavenly grace, and seized with so great a sorrow for having offended God, that on the spot, shedding a flood of tears, he firmly resolved unceasingly to to wash away the stains of his past life, and to put on the new man. Therefore on the very day of his conversion, which happened to be the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, he hastened to the Friars Minor, who are called Capuchins, and begged most earnestly to be admitted to their number. His request was granted on this and on a subsequent occasion, but each time a horrible ulcer, from which he had suffered before, broke out again upon his leg; wherefore he humbly submitted himself to the designs of Divine Providence, which was preparing him for greater things, and conquering himself he twice laid aside the Franciscan habit, which he had twice asked for and obtained.

He set out for Rome and was received into the hospital called that of the Incurables. His virtues became so well known that the management of the institution was entrusted to him, and he discharged it with the greatest integrity and a truly paternal solicitude. He esteemed himself the servant of all the sick, and was accustomed to make their beds, to wash them, to heal their sores, and to aid them in their last agony with his prayers and pious exhortations. In discharging those offices he gave striking proofs of his wonderful patience, unconquered fortitude, and heroic charity. But when he perceived how great an advantage the knowledge of letters would be would be to him in assisting those in danger of death, to whose service he had devoted his life, he was not ashamed at the age of thirty-two to return again to school and to learn the first elements of grammar among children. Being afterwards promoted in due order to the priesthood, he was joined by several companions and in spite of the opposition attempted by the enemy of the human race, laid the foundation of the Congregation of Regular Clerks, Servants of the Sick. In this work Camillus was wonderfully strengthened by a heavenly voice coming from an image of Christ crucified, which, by an admirable miracle loosing the hands from the wood, stretched them out towards him. He obtained the approbation of his order from the Apostolic See. Its members bind themselves by a fourth and very arduous vow--namely, to minister to the sick, even those infected with the plague. St. Philip Neri, who was his confessor, attested how pleasing this institution was to God, and how greatly it contributed toward the salvation of souls; for he declared that he often saw angels suggesting words to disciples of Camillus, when they were assisting those in their agony.

When he had thus bound himself more strictly than before to the service of the sick, he devoted himself with marvellous ardour to watching over their interest, by night and by day, till his last breath. No labour could tire him, no peril of his life could affright him. He became all to all, and claimed for himself the lowest offices, which he discharged promptly and joyfully, in the humblest manner, often on bended knees, as though he saw Christ Himself present in the sick. In order to be more at the command of all in need, he of his own accord laid aside the general government of the order, and deprived himself of the heavenly delights with which he was inundated during contemplation. His fatherly love for the unfortunate shone out with greatest brilliancy when Rome was suffering first a contagious distemper, and then from a great scarcity of provisions; and also when a dreadful plague was ravaging Nola in Campania. In a word, he was consumed with so great a love of God and his neighbour that he was called an angel, and merited to be helped by the angels in different dangers which threatened him on his journeys. He was endowed with the gift of prophecy, and the grace of healing, and he cold read the secrets of hearts. By his prayers he at one time multiplied food, and at another changed water into wine. At length, worn out by watching, fasting, and ceaseless labour, he seemed to be nothing but skin and bone. he endured courageously five long and troublesome sicknesses, which he used to call the "Mercies of the Lord"; and, strengthened by the sacraments, with the sweet names of Jesus and Mary on his lips, he fell asleep in our Lord, while these words were being said: "May Christ Jesus appear to thee with a sweet and gracious countenance." He died at Rome, at the hour he had foretold, on the day before the Ides of July, in the year of salvation 1614, the sixty-fifth of his age.

Angel of charity, by what wonderful paths did the Divine Spirit lead thee! The vision of thy pious mother remained long unrealized; before taking on thee the holy Cross and enlisting comrades under that sacred sign, thou didst serve the odious tyrant, who will have none but slaves under his standard, and the passion of gambling was well nigh thy ruin.

O Camillus, remembering the danger thou didst incur, have pity on the unhappy slaves of passion; free them from the madness wherewith they risk, to the caprice of chance, their goods, their honour, and their peace in this world and in the next. Thy history proves the power of grace to break the strongest ties and alter the most inveterate habits: may these men, like thee, turn their bent towards God, and change their rashness into love of the dangers to which holy charity may expose them! For charity, too, has its risks, even the peril of life, as the Lord of charity laid down his life for us: a heavenly game of chance, which thou didst play so well that the very Angels applauded thee. But what is the hazarding of earthly life compared with the prize reserved for the winner?

According to the commandment of the Gospel read by the Church in thy honour, may we all, like thee, love our brethren as Christ has loved us! Few, says St. Augustine, love one another to this end, that God may be all in all. Thou, O Camillus, having this love, didst exercise it by preference towards those suffering members of Christ's mystic Body, in whom our Lord revealed Himself more clearly to thee, and in whom His kingdom was nearer at hand. Therefore, has the Church in gratitude chosen thee, together with John of God, to be guardian of those homes for the suffering which she has founded with a mother's thoughtful care. Do honour to that Mother's confidence. Protect the hospitals against the attempts of an odious and incapable secularization, which, in its eagerness to lose the souls, sacrifices even the corporal well-being of the unhappy mortals committed to the care of its evil philanthropy. In order to meet our increasing miseries, multiply thy sons, and make them worthy to be assisted by Angels. Wherever we may be in this valley of exile when the hour of our last struggle sounds, make use of thy precious prerogative which the holy Liturgy honours today; help us, by the spirit of holy love, to vanquish the enemy and attain unto the heavenly crown! Amen. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year, Volume XIII, Time After Pentecost: Book IV, pp. 126-130.) 

Saint Camillus de Lellis may have laid aside the Franciscan habit. He lived out the spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi, however, until he had breathed his last on July 14, 1614, as it was in the spirit of the Seraphic Saint, who had led a carefree, frivolous (but not sinful) life as a youth, that our saint of charity to all who needed it regardless of their circumstances or the state of their immortal souls at the time he found them in need exhibited throughout the course of his inspirational service to the sick and the dying.

Saint Camillus de Lellis never viewed someone who was sick as a “burden”, and he never viewed them in a utilitarian cost-benefit manner. He gave to the suffering as he knew he was serving Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ mystically through them. In other words, Saint Camillus de Lellis was the antithesis of the worldly wise Aztecs, who are enabled all too frequently by “well-trained” theological “experts” who have never met a “brain dead” person they did not want to see killed off, and he approached the sick, the suffering and dying in a manner that puts to shame the “palliative care” industry whose minions are trained to incant soothing euphemisms robotically to convince pa patients and/or their relatives in a program of “care” that winds up killing them in the name of “compassion.”

May this prayer to Our Lady, Health of the Sick, plant a few seeds in the souls of those who are so wrapped up in the carrying out of wickedness in the name of “compassionate healthcare” and “death with dignity” that they have forgotten that there is nothing charitable about causing the deaths of innocent human beings:

Virgin, most holy, Mother of the Word Incarnate, Treasurer of graces, and Refuge of sinners, I fly to thy motherly affection with lively faith, and I beg of thee the grace ever to do the will of God.

Into thy most holy hands I commit the keeping of my heart, asking thee for health of soul and body, in the certain hope that thou, my most loving Mother, will hear my prayer.

Into the bosom of thy tender mercy, this day, every day of my life, and at the hour of my death, I commend my soul and body.

To thee I entrust all my hopes and consolations, all my trials and miseries, my life and the end of my life, that all my actions may be ordered and disposed according to thy will and that of thy Divine Son. Amen.

Our Lady of  the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Camillus de Lellis, pray for us.