St. Peregrine Laziosi

Who they were

Peregrine was born in Forlì, in what is now Italy, into a family on the anti-papal side of a long political conflict. As a young man he was part of that opposition, and the story that follows is unusual because it starts with him committing an assault. When the papal legate, Philip Benizi, came to preach reconciliation, Peregrine struck him in the face. Benizi's response, according to the account, was simply to offer the other cheek.

That encounter changed him. Peregrine joined the Servite order and spent decades in Siena and Forlì, known for long hours of prayer standing rather than sitting, and for work among the poor and the sick.

In his sixties he developed a cancer of the leg, described in the sources as a spreading and foul-smelling growth. The decision was made to amputate. The night before the surgery he prayed at length before a painted crucifix and, according to the account, fell asleep and dreamed that Christ reached down and touched the leg. When the surgeon arrived in the morning, the wound was gone.

He lived another twenty years and died at eighty-five. He was canonized in 1726. The medical particulars are what they are, at a distance of seven centuries, but the shape of the story is what people hold onto: a man who had the disease, expected to lose the limb, and did not.

Why people turn to St. Peregrine Laziosi

The patronage is unusually direct. Most patronages come from a saint's occupation or a symbolic association. Peregrine's comes from having had the illness himself, in an age with no treatment, and from an account of recovery on the eve of surgery. That is why people facing a diagnosis turn to him specifically: not a general helper of the sick, but someone the tradition says stood exactly where they are standing.

How to ask their intercession

Name the person and the diagnosis. Ask him to pray for them, for the people treating them, and for the ordinary courage that a long treatment takes. Prayer is not a substitute for medicine and this is not a transaction. Where healing does not come the way anyone hoped, people who pray this way still consistently describe finding somewhere to put what they cannot control.