Sometimes when I pray the Our Father and come across the line, "thy kingdom come," I am carried away in my mind's eye for a moment to Hawaii. So far in my life, the most heavenly place I have been is Hawaii. So, when I read this week that Damien the Leper is about to canonized a saint, I cheered. For someone to become a canonized saint by the Catholic Church, there has to be a second miraculous healing of 2 different people whose deadly conditions left no hope other than Heaven's intervening.
Audrey Toguchi of Hawaii had a form of cancer that her doctor described as surely fatal, "Nobody has ever survived this cancer. It's going to take you." Audrey is the granddaughter of a leper who was exiled to the part of Molokai that was the leper colony where Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest, served as priest to the lepers, eventually becoming a leper himself.
Audrey and her two sisters visited Blessed Damien's grave and prayed for his intercession. Shortly thereafter her healing began and turned into a miraculous healing that medicine could not explain. This second miracle ascribed to the intervention of Damien the Leper was just recognized as authentic by the Vatican. The date of the actual canonization will be set in the fall.
One event in Father Damien's life that describes his sanctity was his desire to go to confession, but no priest would risk going to the leper colony to minister to this minister of the most rejected people. He sent word to his bishop, begging for some priest to come to him, so the bishop himself came by boat but everyone on the boat did not want to get close enough for a meeting between the two. So Damien shouted his confession to the bishop on the boat and received absolution by the bishop shouting back to him.
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