I remained totally paralyzed until approximately the end of August. Then one Sunday morning I called for my dad to come to me. He did not hear me because he had the radio on. I then got up and walked through two rooms to the side of my dad. These were the first steps I had taken in three months! I have always felt that I am walking today because of my mother's prayers to Father Seelos [for his intercession].
As the 1980s come to a close, over a thousand pieces of mail a month arrive at New Orleans's Seelos Center where, since official acceptance of the Cause by Rome, records of healings and other favors attributed to Father Seelos' intercession are amassed. A monthly bulletin on the saint publishes some of the letters of thanks to encourage readers to also seek the prayer help of the saint. In a June 1986 copy, a grandmother writes her gratitude for Father Seelos' prayers; she has just attended the high school graduation of her grandaughter stricken with leukemia eleven years earlier. The July bulletin includes a thank you for no further polyps or tumors from an individual one year into recovery from colon cancer.
From Erin, Tennessee, the same month, a mother writes:
My son was in a very bad car accident. The doctor said at the time he didn't see how he was alive. He had a crushed pelvis and left leg. . . . At that time he was told he'd never use his left leg and live a normal life because of his crushed pelvis. Well I asked for your prayers and I began to pray to Fr. Seelos [for his]. Today my son lives a normal life and wall(s fine even without a cane. Fr. Seelos again has helped. God be praised.
Among the cases believed able to meet the Church's stringent criteria for beatification miracles and forwarded to Rome for further study is a young woman's healing which looks like the first recorded cure of sickle-cell anemia, a disease which to date can merely be controlled but never conquered by medical means. Another case is a crippled woman's surgery which strangely accomplished things far beyond what doctors feel possible.
A third is the extraordinary cure of Angela Boudreaux from terminal liver cancer. In an interview for this book, Mrs. Boudreaux revealed that, besides her cure, which may one day be proclaimed an official miracle by the Church, Father Seelos has been God's channel for several healings in her family.
These begin with a "cure" which seems rather minor--unless you've ever cared day after day, night after night, for a baby screaming, scratching, and crying with the pain and itching of severe eczema. That was the case with the Boudreaux's fourth child, John, who about a year after his birth in 1964 developed an allergy his mother says "was so bad that.any creases in the body, such as those of elbows, knees, armpits, the back of the neck, etc., would crack and bleed with an odor like a drainage ditch."
Because he scratched and bled all night, crying all the while, his mother had to rig up cardboard restraints when she pajamaed him so he would be unable to bend his arm to further gouge his flesh. This nightmare had gone on about a year, starting not long after he was weaned from breast-feeding to canned formula; yet the pediatrician and another specialist assured the mother it had nothing to do with any food allergy.
Angela says she had reached the end of her rope when she found a pamphlet from the Seelos Center in nearby New Orleans. The pamphlet offered a Redemptorist priest from the Center to visit anyone hospitalized and pray over them for a cure through Father Seelos' intercession.
Little John wasn't hospitalized but his distraught mother, she can now kid, felt she might soon be. Two days after his second birthday, on Friday, March 4, she carried the miserable child to the Seelos Center. To her dismay, she found the lone priest (not the gracious man there now) little inclined to pray for the baby; if he extended his offer to the non-hospitalized, he explained, he feared he would be overwhelmed. Angela begged and pleaded that he just bless the child with Father Seelos' crucifix in God's name.
"You're looking for a miracle," the priest accused as if this were an offense.
"I'm asking God," corrected the determined mother, "for a doctor who will find out what's wrong with my child so they'll cure what he has or keep it under control."
Only after half an hour's wrangling and Angela's firm promise not to run out and tell other people her non-hospitalized child had been prayed for at the Center did the priest reluctantly bless the scabby-skinned two-year-old.
The next Tuesday, March 8, a nurse working for the specialist who had been ineffectually treating John suddenly took advantage of her boss's absence to recommend that Angela consult another doctor, who, in turn, immediately sent the little patient to dermatologist James Burke.
Dr. Burke sandwiched the toddler into his day's schedule, To Angela's joy and relief, as soon as he looked at him, he said offhandedly, "Oh, we can get that under control." He ordered John off all soap and a number of foods such as the milk formula, orange juice, egg, and chocolate. For temporary relief he gave a shot. Although allergy specialists would not expect food-triggered eczema to clear up until some days after the last offending item was eaten, that night when Angela bathed John with the recommended over-the-counter soap substitute, the eczemic scales simply floated away with the bathwater.
Put to bed without any restraints in his pajama sleeves, the toddler slept peaceably-as did his grateful parents and siblings.
From then on, he neither scratched nor bled. In 1987, for twenty-three-year-old John his childhood eczema is only a story.
Five months later, in the first days of August 1966, unpleasant symptoms of her own sent Angela to nearby New Orleans' Sellers and Sanders Clinic. There Dr. Alfred J. Rufty took her history, palpated her abdomen swollen to-proportions of a six-month pregnancy, and found a liver nine times normal size. Angela had excellent rapport with her doctor and can say, "I trusted him to the fullest," but when he tentatively diagnosed, "My guess is you have cirrhosis of the liver," Angela recalls:
"I sat up and said indignantly, 'Doctor, I don't even drink."' The amused doctor countered that there are all kinds of cirrhosis, some quite unrelated to alcohol.
But the truth was to prove worse. A precautionary biopsy under local anesthesia retrieved no liver tissue at all-only malignant cells. A follow-up brought liver tissue but saturated with cancer.
Exploratory surgery was scheduled immediately for August 8 at Southern Baptist Hospital.
"How long will the operation be," Angela asked. Because Rufty respected her wish "to know everything," he told her frankly, "It'll be one hour if there's no hope; if it's five hours long (because removal of the cancer appears possible), you'll be flat on your back for at least a year."
"Well, when I come out I'm going to ask what time it is. Then I'll know exactly how I stand," Angela said with characteristic resoluteness.
Both Dr. Rufty and Dr. Freeman, the surgeon, were non-Catholics but the latter, a genial six-foot-six-inch Methodist, was willing to wear a memento of Father Seelos, as a symbol of prayer for his intercession, on his surgeon's cap while operating (Angela was allowed nothing on herself). Asking that intercession, the young mother of four put herself in God's hands.
The operation took one hour.
Dr. Freeman found the liver simply "replaced" by a malignant tumor (90 percent tumor, 10 percent liver, Angela would be told). Its dimensions nine times normal, the organ "contained multiple nodules of tumor," reported Freeman, "in both lobes." To have cut all the diseased organ away would have been to leave the patient liverless. Freeman could only sew her up. His report ends, "Prognosis: poor."
To verify his findings, the Southern Baptist Hospital pathologist, Dr. Frankie M. Slay, sent tissue samples taken during the operation to other pathologists for biopsy, including Dr. Will Steinberg at Tulane and doctors at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington, D.C. All agreed the liver's invader was malignant.
Furthermore, because only children usually have liver cancer by itself, the pathologists agreed it would be very surprising if there was not another, primary (that is, parent) tumor in Angela's body of which the liver cancer was merely a deadly offspring.
Experiments have shown that a doctor shaking his head worriedly over a patient can lower that individual's resistance significantly as measured by white cells. Now Dr. Rufty, whom Angela trusted so, told her that she would most likely be dead of total liver failure within two weeks. In fact she would probably never leave the hospital.
"I'm a very positive thinker," Angela has said.
Instead of turning to planning her funeral, Angela's mind went to Father Seelos' prayers and how they had obtained just what she sought for John.
She looked the doctor in the eye.
"What will you do for treatment?" she asked.
"Fifteen pathologists from throughout the United States will study the malignancy and recommend what type of chemotherapy we might try as a treatment if,"--his voice underlined the word---"you're still alive in two weeks."
Not only alive, but with her liver improving rather than failing, Angela was home by her August 26 birthday. On her way, she had stopped at Fr. Seelos' grave, in St. Mary's. There, although she had been told she could not kneel, kneel she did to give thanks.
Meanwhile the consulting pathologists, probably figuring that the object of their deliberations wouldn't be alive long enough to profit by them, took their time. It was well over a month after exploratory surgery revealed her terminal condition, before the hospital called to say the recommendation had been received.
Proposed was a purely experimental treatment for the liver tumor (to the physicians' chagrin, in spite of every possible exploration--was this the first part of a miracle?--no other cancer site could be found).
Beginning that fall, a derivative of the deadly World War I chemical warfare poison mustard gas, called Thiotepa, was given Angela once a week through intravenous glucose solution. She was counseled soberly that she must prepare herself for severe side effects including terrible nausea, the loss of her hair, possible loss of teeth from loosening, bleeding gums, and others. She would, Dr. Rufty told her again, be flat on her back for a whole year suffering greatly and unable to do anything.
And there was, with all of this, little hope that the experimental treatment would do anything but add to her miseries.
To say Angela surprised her physicians is putting it mildly.
She had absolutely no side effects to the derivative of the gas that decimated both German and Allied troops. Further, once recovered from the surgery, she was up and doing. That Thanksgiving--four months after being given two weeks to live --with help she was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her family of six and guests. Christmas, she had out-of-town guests who stayed on into January so she could show them all the sights of nearby New Orleans.
Literally she has never looked back, except to tell her story to interested people for the glory of God and to honor the prayer power of Francis Xavier Seelos.
Five years later, in October 1971, Angela elected to have surgery for gallstones, predicting that something extraordinary would be found when her liver was once more exposed to a surgeon s view.
It was: Dr. David Weilbaecher's report says he found only tiny scars on the liver surface while the liver itself appeared normally tumorless. Both a needle biopsy and a wedge biopsy were again done. Like a liver scan done at the same time, they showed only a normal liver.
A follow-up report sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology received the non-committal comment, "the apparent cure following treatment with Thiotepa is remarkable."
Was the chemotherapy the cause of cure? The men who can best judge that, Angela Boudreaux's physicians, don't think so. For one thing, she had already lived on in an inexplicable way before chemotherapy ever commenced. Then, according to Dr. Rufty, her liver shrank and returned to normal too rapidly for the chemotherapy to have been the agent of change. The Protestant presented her case to a group of medical colleagues and said, "This case is definitely a miracle." He and other non-Catholic doctors cooperated fully, as did Catholic David Welbaecher, in submitting her medical history, to Rome in favor of Father Seelos' Cause.
In June 1986, Dr. Rufty, presently working in the field of cardiology as associate professor at Wake Forest University's Bowman Cray School of Medicine, in a letter to Angela said he had discussed her case at length with Dr. Weilbaecher at a Louisiana State University medical school reunion. Noting that both doctors had testified before the ecclesiastical board of inquiry, he added they agreed that "yours was the most amazing case we've ever been associated with."
Even Jesus found that only a small percentage of those he healed returned to give thanks. In the case of Angela Boudreaux, her gratitude to God for the cure and thanksgiving to Father Seelos for his prayers led her to become a tireless worker toward the Church's official recognition of the Redemptorist priest's sanctity.
Perhaps this wholehearted gratitude opened her to receive continued blessings from God through his saint. Then again, in life Father Seelos was a genial, compassionate man who never lost interest in those he once helped-whether they were as grateful as Angela Boudreaux or not. At any rate, in 1975 the Louisiana family feels they once again had proof of the power of Father Seelos' intercession.
That year, twenty-year-old Angela Marie, the oldest of the family's four children, was attending the University of New Orleans. Like many students who get very good grades, she was highly stressed. Besides working her way through school playing the organ for weddings and holding down a part-time job, Angela Marie was re-adjusting to American life after a year as a scholarship student in France.
During periods of stress, such as exam times, she had always tended to have a skin allergy that looked something like ringworm.
That allergy was acting up now, and her mom counseled her to go to the family's dermatologist, Nia Terezakis, a Catholic woman physician from India.
The same evening, Dr. Terezakis phoned Angela Marie's mother.
"Mrs. Boudreaux," the physician confided, "I'm worried. Not about the rash. But about the itty-bitty shiny black mole--a little flat thing the size of a straight pin head. I found it on your daughter's back. I cut it out deep--eleven stitches' worth-and it's being biopsied."
Neither doctor nor her family wanted to frighten Angela Marie. But they all prayed, asking the intercession of Father Seelos, that the dermatologist's worst fears not be realized.
At first it seemed they were. Biopsy showed a malignant melanoma, the most deadly type of skin or mole cancer. Without lumps, any sensation or pain, it quietly kills, not by the pin-size head but through the strangling, fast-growing feelers, or "roots."
Dr. Terezakis dug with her scalpel again. This time, after forty-three stitches were required to close her extensive chase after those roots, she could report that she had removed them successfully, along with the pecan-sized malignancy below the surface of the skin. The deadly feelers had almost but not quite--the difference between life and death--penetrated the young woman's lungs.
With every mole on her body removed and strict instructions to avoid the sun, Angela Marie was no worse for wear from a close brush with death.
"Mrs. Boudreaux," Dr. Terezakis said confidentially to her mother, "if your daughter hadn't come in when she did, she would have been dead in a month or two."
Pure luck? Whatever you think, the Boudreaux family, including now married and healthy Angela Marie, credit God and the intercession of Francis Xavier Seelos.
In 1983, the family believes, they received a fourth cure through the one-time missionary for son Andre, then twenty five.
Working eighteen hours a day in New Orleans's French Quarter, at about 9 P.m. on December 19, Andre left the restaurant where he was maitre d', walking over to his second job on Bourbon Street. Suddenly, two thugs cornered him, sat on him, and shot him in the face, while robbing him of the two hundred dollars in his pocket.
Somehow Andre got to his feet and ran back to the restaurant, blood streaming from the gunshot wound, which missed his eye by half an inch. Stumbling in the door, in spite of his injured tongue and missing teeth, he managed to gasp to security men, "Call the paramedics."
By the time he was examined in a hospital, his head was swollen three times normal size, and he was in danger of suffocation. Doctors desired to do a tracheotomy, that is to cut into the trachea, or windpipe, through the neck to permit the body air intake that way; but they wanted Andre's parents' permission as next of kin.
His mother took the phone call at the Boudreaux home in Gretna. She recalls she began at once to pray aloud for the intercession of Father Seelos. Immediately, she remembers, a sense of "calm came over me."
Driving toward New Orleans, she shushed her husband, Melvin, who was screaming and swearing in anger at the thieves and grief over his son, so she could focus on praying. In the middle of crossing a particular bridge, she recalls plainly four years later, Father Seelos, as God's messenger, seemed to say, "Tell your son when you go in [to see him], he doesn't need the operation; he'll be fine."
At the hospital the parents found their son's friends gathered, weeping. Angela calmed them with assurances that Andre was not going to die. Her words may have seemed a mother's need to deny reality, for another young man brought in that night who had been shot in the face with the same-type bullet died the next day.
"Andre should have died three times," the mother says she believes. But as far as she was concerned then and now, Father Seelos had given her a word from God--and she believed it.
After prayer and telling her son he didn't need the tracheotomy, Angela went home and peacefully to sleep, to her husband's amazement. More typical of the parent whose child has just been shot, Melvin walked the floor.
Unable to talk or eat--he lost sixteen pounds almost overnight--and such a sight that his sister had nightmares after seeing him, Andre had only reassurance from his mother that, however things seemed, he was going to be fine.
She was right.
Hospitalized the night of December 19, on December 23 he was discharged. Christmas Eve he was in church with the rest of the family--giving God thanks for his life.
Today there is not even a scar to show Andre Boudreaux was once shot in the face at close range.
Not long after the murderous attack on his son, Melvin Boudreaux developed a rare tropical skin disease that can be fatal; after more requests to the "family saint" for his prayers, Dr. Terezakis was able to control it with medication.
Perhaps
it was at this point God decided this family needed the mother in a particular
kind of supportive environment. Perhaps Father Seelos had simply become
especially fond of some of his "best clients."
All Angela knows is she found herself unhappy in her job because of the racial injustice there. A woman of prayer, she asked God to get her out of such an unchristian situation, as usual asking Father Seelos' intercession.
In answer, the firm decided to discharge two of their three secretaries, Angela among them. Three days later came a call form the Seelos Center wondering if she would take the secretaries job there.
Are ducks drawn to water?
With Angela now able to make her exuberant volunteer efforts vocational as well, it seems only a matter of time before the prayer power of Father Francis Xavier Seelos becomes a household word.
photo: Melvin and Angela Boudreaux
This article is taken from "Nothing Short of A Miracle," a book on the healing power of the saints, by Patricia Treece.
This can be ordered through the Seelos Center (see homepage for address) or directly through amazon.com by clicking here on its title: Nothing Short of a Miracle.
Two of the chapters are on Father Seelos.