Patron Saint of Cancer

Why St. Peregrine Laziosi?

Peregrine was a fourteenth-century friar who developed a cancer of the leg severe enough that amputation was scheduled for the following day. The account holds that he spent the night in prayer before a crucifix and that the wound was found healed in the morning. He lived roughly another twenty years and died in his eighties. That is the whole basis of the patronage, and it is why people reach for him at the moment of a diagnosis rather than on a calendar date. One thing has to be said plainly on a page like this. Peregrine was healed and most people who pray to him are not, at least not in the way they asked. The Church does not read that as failure, and it certainly does not read it as insufficient faith. Nor has the Church ever proposed his intercession as an alternative to treatment. Praying and undergoing oncology at the same time is the ordinary Catholic position and there is no tension in it whatsoever. St. Agatha is separately invoked for breast cancer, from the manner of her own martyrdom.

Who was St. Peregrine Laziosi?

Peregrine Laziosi was born in Forli about 1260 into a family opposed to the papacy, and as a young man took part in the politics of that opposition. The turning point is a public one: he struck St. Philip Benizi, who had come to preach reconciliation, and Philip offered him the other cheek. Peregrine joined the Servites not long after.

He is said to have kept a penance of standing whenever standing was possible, for years, and the sores that developed on his leg turned cancerous. Amputation was scheduled. The night before, he prayed at length before a crucifix in the chapter house and fell asleep there; he woke, in the account, to find the leg whole.

He lived another twenty years and died in 1345 at about eighty-five. He was canonised in 1726, and the patronage of cancer patients follows directly from that night rather than from anything symbolic.

The feast: May 1

May 1, beside the memorial of St. Joseph the Worker on the same day. Many parishes with a Servite connection offer a blessing of the sick on or near the feast, and novenas to him are prayed at any point in a diagnosis rather than only in May.

How to ask their intercession

Ask for the healing you actually want, by name, without hedging it in advance. Then add the harder half: the request for what to do if the answer is no. And keep the treatment going. If anything ever makes you feel you must choose between a doctor and a prayer, that is not the Church speaking.