Rachel Lozano didn't die of cancer as the doctors predicted, and she says it's a miracle.
Not a miracle like a last-minute goal or winning the lottery. The real deal: the work of God through the intercession of a saint.
Other Roman Catholics in St. Louis believe, too, and on Friday, the St. Louis Archdiocese officially wrapped up its investigation into the claimed miracle with a prayer service to mark the occasion. Boxes of testimony generated by the investigative tribunal — about 3,000 pages — will be sent to Rome, where the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints will examine the evidence.
Lozano said she doesn't really have to wait. She already knows the answer to how her cancer was cured, and "medicine can't explain it.
"There's just a peacefulness inside me," she said, "whether the church declares it a miracle or not."
She attributes her remarkable recovery to the French priest Blessed William Joseph Chaminade, who lived from 1761 to 1850. If her case is indeed deemed a miracle, the pope could one day canonize Chaminade as a saint.
"I just feel elated to be part of the process," Lozano said Friday before the prayer service.
One miracle has already been attributed to Chaminade's intercession, the curing of a Argentine woman's lung cancer in 1991. The Vatican deemed that a miracle in 1998. Based on that miracle, Pope John Paul II in 2000 beatified Chaminade, a step toward canonization.
Lozano attended Chaminade's beatification in Rome, and that was the foundation of her miraculous recovery, she and others say.
"She was not feeling well at all," said the Rev. James Tobin, the pastor at Lozano's church, Our Lady of the Pillar, who went with her to Rome. "She began entrusting her health to the intercession of Blessed Chaminade."
Lozano had survived several bouts with cancer, and even underwent a stem cell transplant, but in 2002, doctors found a tumor growing near her heart, lungs and spine.
The news from doctors was all bad: Surgery would kill her. So would the cancer, in weeks or months, depending on which organ the cancer struck first. No one had survived a recurrence of this cancer after a stem cell transplant.
But she lived weeks, months, a year. Scans showed her tumor, which she named Spanky, wasn't growing as expected.
Eventually a surgeon removed the tumor and found it was dead.
"It was pretty astounding," her oncologist told the Post-Dispatch last year.
The Marianists order of Catholic brothers and priests found Lozano's case compelling and presented her story to the archdiocese as a miracle attributable to Chaminade, the order's founder. An archdiocese tribunal investigated, interviewing Lozano, her family, her doctors, and Tobin, among others.
The tribunal doesn't make a judgment, just gathers evidence. But Monsignor John Shamleffer, judicial vicar who served on the tribunal, said God picked up where doctors couldn't succeed.
"I believe in God's ability to do things we can't do," he said. "I have no reason to believe this is not a miracle."
The tribunal's evidence is now headed to the Vatican. No one knows when a ruling might come from Rome.
"We don't know the end of this process," Brother Michael McAward, secretary general of the Society of Mary, said Friday night. "It may end in the canonization of Father Chaminade. But what we do know is Rachel has been blessed by God with a cure."
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