Audrey Toguchi’s spontaneous cure from an aggressive form of cancer certainly baffled her doctors, but she knew it could happen …

‘When you have a friend like Father Damien’

By Anna Weaver | Hawaii Catholic Herald

In 1936, when Sacred Hearts Father Damien de Veuster’s remains were put on a ship in Honolulu to be sent back to his birthplace in Belgium, 8-year-old Audrey Toguchi lined up with fellow Catholic school students along the walkway to the wharf to bid aloha to the holy man of Kalaupapa.

Seventy-two years later, this past April 29, Toguchi received news that her healing in 1999 from cancer, which she attributed to the intercession of Blessed Damien, had been approved by the theological commission of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Bishop Larry Silva released Toguchi’s name for the first time in his April 29 e-mail announcing the theological consultors’ decision. In it, he said of the major step toward Blessed Damien’s canonization, “I give thanks and praise to God for the news I received this morning!”

Toguchi’s long-time personal hero is now just two short steps away from canonization. The final actions required to declare Damien a saint are the endorsement of the congregation’s committee of cardinals and bishops and the approval of the pope.

Photo courtesy Audrey Toguchi Audrey and Yukio Toguchi at Father Damien’s gravesite during their “thanksgiving” pilgrimage in 2004.

Damien has long been someone that Toguchi, who turns 80 on June 23, has relied on for help. “When you have a problem and you put everything in God’s hands, what do you have to stress about?” she said. “When you have a friend like Father Damien, he’s going to intercede on your behalf.”

Devotion to Damien

Audrey Horner Toguchi is a woman of strong faith, a lifelong Catholic, who went to grade school at St. Augustine in Waikiki and to high school at Sacred Hearts Academy and learned early on about the heroic actions of Father Damien.

After teaching at Sacred Hearts for a year after graduation, she decided to major in education at the University of Hawaii-Manoa “to test myself.” She taught in Hawaii public schools for 44 years while raising two sons, Eric and Ivan, with her husband Yukio Toguchi, and earning a master’s in educational psychology along the way.

Whenever Toguchi needed assistance, she turned to prayer and encouraged her sons to do the same. “All these little things I had throughout life, I put in God’s hands,” she said. “I always tell him, you created me and you know what’s wrong. Please help me.”

It was her faith that led her to work in public schools after she asked herself where she could best be of help. “You aren’t allowed to use the word God, but that doesn’t keep you from teaching [students to] love one another, respect one another,” Toguchi said. “I figured I was there and I had a purpose for being there.”

She emphasized to her students that each one of them was special, something she learned in part from Damien’s reaching out to those who were made to feel like criminals because they had contracted leprosy, or Hansen’s disease. “Father Damien is a good example of making people know that they were special even when they were clamped down by society,” she said. “For people who are downtrodden they have to know that they are special.”

Eric Toguchi, who is an elementary school teacher in Spokane, says his parents raised him and his brother to be humble, “low to the ground” people, who were thankful for what they had in life. He and Ivan both attended Catholic schools from elementary through college.

He remembers taking his first plane ride as a kid with his parents and brother to the Big Island. They stopped over on Molokai and Audrey made sure to take them to the Kalaupapa lookout. The Toguchi boys heard stories about Father Damien and the patients all the time. In fact, two of Audrey’s relatives had been sent to Kalaupapa.

“I think one of the reasons why she prayed to Father Damien and not anyone else is because he has very much local ties,” Eric said. “In my mom’s mind and heart, this is someone who has given up a lot to come and help the people of Hawaii. That kind of dedication endeared him to her.”

Healing

In 1995, after nearly 50 years of teaching, Toguchi retired. In late 1996, after Audrey suffered a fall, her husband spotted a small lump on her left gluteal area. What she thought was a hematoma, or pooling of blood, from the fall kept expanding, and in December 1997, Toguchi consulted Dr. Walter Y.M. Chang.

Toguchi had prayed to Damien for his intercession when one of her kidneys had to be removed in 1978. She again asked him for help when the now fist-sized lump on her side was removed in January 1998.

Audrey’s younger sister, Velma Horner, recalls Toguchi asking her to pray that the mass was not cancer. She, Audrey, and their other sister, Beverly Plunkett, traveled to Kalaupapa to pray at Damien’s gravesite and attend Mass at St. Philomena in Kalawao.

Damien had been beatified three years earlier, and Horner knew that he needed a second miracle to become a saint. “Right at the grave I asked Father Damien that it be Audrey,” she said.

Tests on the mass removed from Toguchi’s hip turned out to be a high-grade pleomorphic liposarcoma, an aggressive and rare form of cancer of the fat tissues. She had more tissue removed and received radiation in the area.

However, scans done in September 1998 showed that three new lumps had formed on her lungs. Doctors gave her less than six months to live.

“It was like the doctor told me about someone else,” Toguchi remembers. But she “put everything in God’s hands.”

“Father Damien, you’re not going to let me go,” she thought.

Dr. Chang recalled telling Audrey she should consider chemotherapy, which might help. “She calmly replied, ‘No, I’m going to pray to Father Damien,’” he recalled.

Yukio Toguchi said, “It was really a devastating blow.” He and his sons agreed Audrey should try the chemotherapy but they also supported her decision to make another trip to Kalaupapa with her sisters to ask Damien for his intercession.

“When it comes to religion, 100 percent I support her,” said Yukio, who was baptized Methodist but married Audrey in the Catholic Church and raised their sons Catholic.

Horner said, “It takes a lot when you’re facing death and no matter what you’re still putting your faith in God. A lot of people could despair right there.” But Horner says her sister “just laid her whole life unto him.”

In October 1998, Toguchi went back to Dr. Chang. New x-rays showed that her lung tumors had begun to shrink.

Dr. Chang asked her if she’d done anything like acupuncture, taken herbs or seen another doctor. She told him she’d gone to Kalaupapa and prayed to Damien. Family and friends had also been praying.

“You never think that a cancer that’s aggressive is going to disappear,” Dr. Chang said. In fact he believes Toguchi is the only documented case where liposarcoma has “spontaneously regressed,” or gone away without any treatment.

Two more x-rays revealed further shrinkage until scans in May and August 1999 could find no sign of the cancer.

“Still you worry about it,” Yukio said of the five- to six-year wait doctors say it takes for cancer to be considered in full remission. But by 2004, he and Audrey made a thanksgiving pilgrimage to Kalaupapa to celebrate her healing.

Dr. Chang documented Toguchi’s case in an article about “complete spontaneous regression of cancer” in the October 2000 issue of the Hawaii Medical Journal. He also encouraged Toguchi to report her healing to the Catholic Church.

“Even as cynical as doctors sometimes are, they have to admit with a case of spontaneous regression that it’s remarkable,” said the now-retired doctor. “It’s akin to throwing a ping-pong ball across a room, 30 yards long, with two large fans blowing across the room, and I’m trying to throw it through a hole that barely fits the ping-pong ball. After a trillion times it might go through, but it’s not likely.”

Path to sainthood

Soon after Father Damien de Veuster died in 1889, people began calling for his recognition as a saint. But the Catholic Church purposely makes canonizing someone a long process.

Sacred Hearts Sister Helene Wood, the vice-postulator for the cause of Blessed Damien said, “The church is very slow to canonize people. They have to be very careful about who they put up. It’s a long process but it’s a necessary one.”

A person must first be declared “venerable” after lengthy examination of his or her life and works. Pope Paul VI named Damien “venerable” in 1977.

Next the church must approve of two miracles attributed to the sainthood candidate, one for beatification and one for canonization.

An alleged miracle — usually a healing — must be declared as dramatic and “extranatural” by medical experts. Then theologians must determine that it was caused through the sainthood candidate’s intercession.

Father Damien’s beatification miracle was the 1895 cure of a French Sacred Hearts nun, which was approved by the Vatican in 1992. Pope John Paul II declared Damien “blessed” in 1995 in Belgium.

The second miracle was the disappearance of cancer from Toguchi’s lungs without treatment. After hearing about Toguchi’s case and making two trips to Hawaii to research it and talk with her and others, Sacred Hearts Father Emilio Vega Garcia, who was then the postulator for the cause of Blessed Damien, made a formal appeal to Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo in late 2002 to open a tribunal to investigate the healing further.

In March 2003 the Diocese of Honolulu created a six-member tribunal to investigate the miracle. The month-long process involved seven meetings and interviews with six medical doctors, Toguchi, her husband and sister, and two priests who had counseled her. Of the doctors, most of whom were not Catholic, five were connected with Toguchi’s care and one was independent.

Father Joseph Grimaldi, who was then the judicial vicar, headed the tribunal. “We had to verify with evidence that she was truly praying to Father Damien,” he said. “[The doctors] had to explain to us that this was not likely to be cured, except for some supernatural intervention. In other words, this is certainly a mystery.”

The tribunal’s findings were formally opened at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints on Sept. 11, 2003. The congregation asked the Honolulu tribunal to reconvene in 2005 to clarify parts of its original report.

A medical commission ruled the healing “unexplainable according to available medical knowledge” on Oct. 18, 2007. Then in November, an official at the congregation quietly visited Hawaii for further examination of the case.

The April 29 decision by the Causes of Saints theological commission means, as current Damien postulator, Sacred Hearts Father Bruno Benati, said in a May 3 letter on the Sacred Hearts Congregation website, “Now it can be stated that what we have referred to till now as an ‘extraordinary cure’ is a miracle of God through the intercession of Blessed Damien.”

Bishop Silva, who had two relatives sent to Kalaupapa around 90 years ago, said in a phone interview soon after the announcement that he was very happy and grateful to God that the process has reached this point.

“Even if I had not had [family at Kalaupapa], it would still be wonderful news. But the fact that I have that family tie, it makes it even more exciting,” he said.

“Certainly it means that we would hopefully be inspired by Damien and dedicate ourselves even more fully to serving others as he did,” he said, “especially the most needy, the most poor.”

Toguchi also hopes that Damien’s becoming a saint will motivate others.

“If this canonization happens and it lifts the spirits and souls of all those people that are downtrodden, [the long process] is worth it,” she said.