Patron Saint of Cancer
St. Peregrine Laziosi, feast day 1 May
St. Peregrine Laziosi is the patron saint of those living with cancer, with his feast on 1 May. He faced amputation for a cancer of the leg and the wound was found healed. AngelGuard publishes his story and how Catholics pray with him alongside medical treatment.
Quick facts
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.
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.