Saint Giuseppe Moscati

Saint Giuseppe Moscati was an Italian physician, researcher, and university teacher who spent almost his whole life in Naples. He remained a layman. He treated the poor without charge and saw the suffering Christ in the sick. The Church commemorates him on April 12, the day of his death.

He was born on July 25, 1880, in Benevento, the seventh of the nine children of the judge Francesco Moscati and Rosa De Luca. When he was a small child, the family moved to Ancona and then to Naples. There, in 1888, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, he received his First Communion, and there he completed secondary school. When he was still a boy, his brother Alberto, an artillery lieutenant, fell from a horse and suffered an incurable injury. Giuseppe cared for him for years. This experience may have influenced his choice of medical studies.

He earned his medical degree in 1903 with the highest marks. From 1904 he worked in Naples at the Hospital for the Incurables (Ospedale degli Incurabili). In 1906, during the eruption of Vesuvius, he courageously hurried to the hospital in Torre del Greco and saved the patients there. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Naples in 1911, he was not afraid of contagion: he stayed with the sick and carried out research that helped to contain it. During the First World War he directed the military wards in the hospitals of Naples, and in 1919 he became a head physician.

At the same time he carried out research and taught future doctors. In 1911 he qualified as a university lecturer in physiological chemistry, and in 1922 in clinical medicine. He published the results of his research, especially on glycogen, in Italian and foreign scientific journals. He did not regard faith and science as opposed: as a researcher he wanted to serve the truth. He wrote to one of his students that a doctor must care not only for the body but also for the soul of the sick person.

He began his day with Holy Mass and Communion. He did not wait for the sick to come to him: he sought them out in the poorest quarters of the city, treated them for free, and often helped them from his own earnings. He did not start a family. He chose celibacy in order to have more time for his patients, and he used to say that his place was beside the sick. He wrote: “Not science, but charity has transformed the world.”

He died suddenly on April 12, 1927, in his home in Naples, while he was seeing patients. He was 46 years old. The news spread through the city: “The holy doctor has died.” His body rests in the Church of the Gesù Nuovo in Naples.

The beatification process began in Naples in 1931. Pope Paul VI declared him blessed on November 16, 1975, during the Holy Year. John Paul II canonized him on October 25, 1987, in Saint Peter’s Square, during the Synod of Bishops on the vocation and mission of the laity. He held him up then as a model of the lay Christian, especially for doctors, nurses, and all who care for the sick.