Who was St. Peregrine Laziosi?
Peregrine was born at Forlì, in the Romagna region of Italy, in 1265, the son of a Ghibelline leader, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. The Servite friars' own history gives no birth year but says he was eighteen in 1283, which agrees; Benburb Priory, a Servite house in Northern Ireland, puts his birth "about 1256." His family sided against the pope, and Forlì lay under interdict.
In 1283 Pope Martin IV sent St. Philip Benizi, prior general of the Servites, to preach peace to the city. The crowd drove him out with violence, and Peregrine, the Encyclopedia says, "insulted and struck" him. Philip did not strike back. The Servites say that Peregrine, shaken, "humbly asked Philip for forgiveness," and that Philip "received him with love." That blow and that forgiveness are the hinge of his life. He received the Servite habit at the priory in Siena, and the Encyclopedia says it was "only after much persuasion he consented to be ordained a priest." Years later the order sent him back to Forlì, the city he had rioted in, where he gave himself to the psalms, to long prayer and to the poor. The friars record that during a shortage he "miraculously multiplied grain and wine." He did hard penance. When tired he leaned against a choir stall or a rock rather than sit, and he slept on bare earth.
The illness came when he was about sixty. The Servite history says his varicose veins "degenerated into cancer of the right leg." Franciscan Mission Associates places the growth on his right foot. A physician named Paolo Salazio decided, with the friars' consent, to amputate. The night before the operation, Peregrine dragged himself to the crucifix in the chapter room and prayed. He seemed to see Christ come down from the cross and touch the leg. The next morning, the friars say, the doctor "could find no sign of the cancer, or even of a wound." The order dates the healing to 1325 and says its fame "spread rapidly round the western Church."
He lived another twenty years. The Servites say he died of a fever "about 1345 when he was almost eighty years old"; Franciscan Mission Associates says 1345, at eighty-five. The Encyclopedia reports that his body "remains incorrupt to the present day." Pope Paul V declared him blessed in 1609, and Benedict XIII canonized him in 1726; Benburb gives the date as December 27, 1726, together with St. John of the Cross. Franciscan Mission Associates prints 1926, which is a slip.
Why Catholics pray to St. Peregrine for cancer
No papal document names St. Peregrine patron of cancer patients. Franciscan Mission Associates says "the Church appointed him patron of persons with cancer, foot ailments, or any incurable disease," but names no decree, and the Servite province's own pages do not use the word patron at all. They say something simpler: that he "was healed of a cancerous ulcer on his leg which was considered beyond saving." The patronage is traditional. It rests on one night of prayer before a crucifix and on seven centuries of sick people who found that his story matched theirs.
Think about what he lived through. A diagnosis in old age. A surgeon's decision made with the consent of everyone but him. The night before an operation, alone with the fear. That is the exact place where a cancer patient, or the spouse of one, sits today. Catholics do not pray to Peregrine because he promises a cure. They pray to him because he knows the room. Benburb calls him the "Wonderworker" and "a powerful patron for the cure of malignant growths"; Franciscan Mission Associates says that after his healing the sick of Forlì came to him, and that some were cured when he whispered "Jesus" into their ears; the Servite history says only that "some of the sick who came were healed through his intercession." People also ask his prayers for the grace he showed before the cure: patience, honesty about fear, and the will to keep praying when the answer has not come.
How to pray to St. Peregrine
Sources disagree on his feast. Franciscan Mission Associates gives May 1; Benburb Priory says "his feast day is kept on May 4th"; the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia gives April 30. He is not on the General Roman Calendar, so keep the day your parish or the Servites near you keep, and pray a novena in the nine days before it. Any day works. The National Shrine of St. Peregrine at Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica in Chicago, run by the Servite friars, offers a Mass for the Sick on the third Saturday of every month at 11 a.m. with a blessing with his relic, and a Spanish-language healing Mass on the second Saturday. The shrine takes single Mass requests and petitions, and a prayer partner can be reached at prayerpartner@stperegrine.org. Benburb Priory holds a St. Peregrine Mass and healing service on the first Monday of each month.
Say the prayer below the night before the scan, the biopsy or the surgery, as he prayed the night before his. Name the person. Ask for the cure plainly, and then ask for what he had before the cure: the grace to face the next morning. Receive the Anointing of the Sick from your priest and go to Confession; receive the Eucharist. And keep every appointment. Prayer to St. Peregrine accompanies chemotherapy, surgery and the oncologist's plan, and never replaces them. His own healing came in a friary that had already called the doctor.