Augustine also frequented the Hospital of the Incurabili, where he ministered to the sick and the dying. It was in the course of Augustine's pastoral work in this hospital that he met Fabrizio Caracciolo, a relative of Francis Caracciolo. Francis Caracciolo was born Ascanio Caracciolo on October 13, 1563 in Villa Santa Maria, Abruzzi, Italy. At twenty-two, Ascanio Caracciolo was a young man enjoying the exceedingly comfortable life available to an Italian nobleman of the sixteenth century, when he contracted a terrible skin disease. Facing death, he vowed that if he recovered he would give the rest of his life to God, and after his miraculous recovery he immediately began studying for the priesthood and was ordained in 1587 at the age of twenty-five. Ascanio's first work was in Naples, with a confraternity that looked after the spiritual welfare of prisoners and those condemned to death. In 1587, when he mistakenly received a letter addressed to a relative, Father Fabrizio Caracciolo, the Abbot of St. Mary Major in Naples. In it he learned that the writer, a priest call Augustine Adorno, was planning to found an association of priests whose work would combine both active and contemplative life. The project appealed to Ascanio, and he soon joined forces with Augustine Adorno. The three priests retreated to the Camaldolese hermitage in Naples to write the first Constitutions of the Order. In addition to the three evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty and obedience, they contemplated a fourth vow: the renunciation of any ecclesiastical dignity. They recruited ten companions and began their foundation. On July 1 of the same year Pope Sixtus V approved the new group, and on April 9, 1589, the co-founders made their solemn vows, Ascanio taking the name Francis, the name by which he was subsequently known. Members of the congregation, called the Clerics Regular Minor, took the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, plus a fourth: not to seek any ecclesiastical office either within or outside the order. The priests kept perpetual adoration before the Blessed Sacrament and conducted missions, helped the inmates of hospitals and prisons, and established hermitages for those who felt called to a life of contemplation. Francis was elected the order's first general, and although a very self-effacing man accomplished a great deal for it.