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Emerging in the first years of its existence, the hospitaller mission and identity
of the Order is rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ and the theology and
practice of the early Church. Before the Christian era, the Greeks, among others,
had hospital-type facilities attached to temples, most notably at Epidaurus ,
which the Romans expanded, building there in AD 170 a hospital for expectant
mothers and the terminally ill. The Greeks and the Romans, however, considered
sickness a curse, an act of hostility from the gods.
Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, however,
healing the leper, giving sight to the blind, bidding the lame man
walk, linked the act of healing to spiritual renewal. “Whenever
you enter a town and they receive you,” he told the Apostles, “eat
what is set before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The
kingdom of God has come near to you’” (Lk 10, 9). The
Acts of the Apostles enumerates numerous healings linked to faith.
By the fourth century, the healing work
of the Church had received institutional expression. At Cappadocia
, for example, a full-fledged hospital, with wards, housing for physicians,
nurses, and outpatient clinics, founded by Saint Basil, was praised
by Saint Gregory of Nazianzus for its efficiency and spiritual mission.
Saint John Chrysostom founded a similar institution at Constantinople
. In the West, the matron Fabiola (about whom Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman
wrote a novel) founded an important hospital in Rome in 400, which
was praised by Saint Jerome for its mixture of medicine and ministry.
During the late patristic and early
medieval period, bishops began increasingly to create hospitals on
a diocesan basis. In 817 and 836, for example, councils meeting at
Aachen called for hospitals to be attached to each collegiate church,
with the canon clergy responsible for their administration. This
led to the formation of hospital-based communities of professed brothers
and/or sisters following the Rule of Saint Augustine.
For the early Church, hospitality for
travelers and pilgrims was not merely a matter of etiquette. It was,
rather, a practice rooted in the deepest imperatives of Christian
charity. In his famous Rule, Saint Benedict directed his brothers
to receive all guests as they would receive Christ Himself, remembering
Christ’s words that “I was a stranger and you took me
in.” The monasteries of Europe were famous for their hospitality;
indeed, for pilgrims, monasteries frequently provided the only safe
haven as they passed through dangerous terrain.
So, too, did a related institution,
the hospice (from the Latin hospitium, guest-house) rise up in the
early Church under diocesan sponsorship. Like the hospital, hospices
can be traced back to the era of Constantine . Under the supervision
of bishops, they were administered by priests and were intended for
the sick and the poor, orphans and the elderly, as well as travelers.
In 436, the Fourth Council of Carthage regulated their operation
in North Africa . Perhaps the most famous hospice from early medieval
times was the one founded atop an 8,000 foot summit in Switzerland
in 962 by Saint Bernard of Menthon, staffed by Canons Regular of
Saint Augustine, who developed a special breed of dog to rescue travelers
stranded in Alpine snows.
Hospices could be found in the Holy
Lands as early as the time of Charlemagne in the ninth century. A
Hungarian hospice in the Holy Land most likely dates from the year
1000. Furthermore, Benedictine monasteries, as part of their Rule,
always welcomed strangers and it is believed that the early Benedictine
Abbey of Saint Mary of the Latins established a hospice there around
1050 with money from merchants of Amalfi resident in or visiting
the Holy Land .
Named for Saint John of Alexandria,
this hospice was basically a branch establishment of Saint Mary of
the Latins. At some point later in the eleventh century, most probably
an Amalfi merchant connected to this establishment – history
knows him as Blessed Gerard – founded another hospice named
in honor of Saint John the Baptist and organized it according to
the Rule of Saint Augustine. It was from this hospice, we believe,
that our Order originated as a separate entity.
This hospice, however, as important
as it was, while offering medical treatment, was not yet a full hospital.
It was Gerard’s successor, Raymond of Provence, who fused the
two institutions, hospice and hospital, creating a spacious infirmary
complex near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, most likely in the
1120s. Raymond of Provence also wrote out a Rule for the infirmarian brothers
attached to the hospital. As of yet, there were no Knights, although
Raymond was already in the process of organizing military escorts
for pilgrims, which soon led to an expanding role for the Order as
these escorts engaged in military action to ensure the safety of
their charges. By 1200, the Order had expanded to include professed
military brothers, infirmarian brothers, clerical chaplains, and,
slightly thereafter, professed women religious.
Thus two venerable institutions, the
hospice and the hospital, and a later institution, chivalry, were
fused by the Rule of Saint Augustine, in an alembic of Christian
charity and military necessity, to create one of the most enduring
orders of the Church. As powerful as the Order became in military
terms, however, it never abandoned its hospitaller identity. The
hospital built by the Order on Rhodes between 1440 and 1489 was the
greatest institution of its kind in Europe , far in advance of its
time in its facilities and program of treatment. Visitors to the
hospital marveled at its architecture, the cleanliness and comfort
of its facilities, the manner in which professed Knights of noble
lineage, including the Grand Master himself, personally attended
to the sick. When the Order transferred its sovereignty to Malta
, it constructed an equally distinguished facility, modeled on the
Hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome , to which was added a home for
foundlings, an outpatient clinic, and a lazaretto for ships undergoing
quarantine.
For well over 900 years, then, the Order
has been dedicated to a healing ministry on behalf of our lords the
sick and the poor whose model remains Jesus Christ Himself, who on
the verge of his departure from the disciples commissioned them to
go out into the world and to preach the gospel to all nations, to
baptize the unbeliever, to cast out demons and to speak in new tongues,
and, of special significance to our Order, to lay their hands on
the sick and the suffering so that they might find healing for body
and spirit.
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