CNA Staff, May 10, 2024 / 09:08 am
In 2008, the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints ruled that a Hawaiian woman’s cure from cancer was a miracle linked to her prayers to Father Damien De Veuster. This led to the missionary priest — renowned for working with leprosy patients on the island of Molokai, Hawaii — being canonized on Oct. 11, 2009, by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome.
Audrey Toguchi, a retired schoolteacher from the county of Honolulu, became ill in 1997 with a lump on her left thigh that was discovered to be cancerous. She asked her sisters to accompany her to Kalaupapa to pray at Father Damien’s grave.
“I prayed that he would ask God to heal me,” Toguchi told the Honolulu Star Bulletin.
After surgery in January 1998, Dr. Walter Chang told Toguchi that her rare form of cancer, liposarcoma, had spread to both lungs.