St. Aloysius Gonzaga & Plague Victim (M 006) Photo Block

St. Aloysius Gonzaga (1568-1591) was an Italian Jesuit who died far too young while nursing plague victims at Rome. Although he admitted to his spiritual director St. Robert Bellarmine that he found the sights and smells of hospital work revolting—he was raised an aristocrat with all the benefits of an upper-class Renaissance lifestyle--nevertheless, he volunteered to nurse the indigent poor stricken in the outbreak. + In this image, St. Aloysius, clad in surplice and cassock, comforts a plague-ridden patient lying on a pallet on the ground. + Because of his reputation for compassionate care, St. Aloysius Gonzaga is considered patron saint of AIDS patients and their caregivers. + Feast: June 21 + Image Credit (M 006): Detail (on a reconstructed background) extracted from an antique image of S. Luigi Gonzaga che assiste gli appestati [St. Aloysius Gonzaga assisting the infected (especially those with the plague)], late 19th-century chromolithograph, publisher unknown, from the designer’s private collection of religious ephemera.