For years Seelos - who also served as a pastor in Baltimore and Cumberland - has been a physical presence for Heibel, 71, a slim mother of four, grandmother of 11. In a brass necklace reliquary about the size of a silver dollar, the retired antiques appraiser wears a fragment of his bone no longer than the "L" in relic.
She has carried Seelos with her this way since early 2003, when she was diagnosed with and underwent surgery for esophageal cancer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. About a year later, doctors there found that the surgery had missed a cancerous lymph node. So began a seven-week, five-day-a-week regimen of radiation and chemotherapy.
She prayed with Seelos. She asked fellow parishioners to do the same.
A reputation is honed
Seelos' following had been building for decades. In New Orleans especially, where he died at the age of 48 in 1867 of yellow fever while tending to victims of the disease, his reputation was enhanced in the early 1970s. That's when a local woman who had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer was found free of the disease after prayers calling on Seelos. An investigation similar to the one in Heibel's case affirmed this as a miracle, and Seelos was beatified in a ceremony in Rome in 2000.
The priest known as the "cheerful ascetic" would thereafter be officially known as "Blessed Seelos," standing one difficult step away from sainthood.
The difference would be one more miracle, one more case confirmed by a process that has been developing for centuries, as saint-making transformed from a spontaneous phenomenon to a formal procedure giving ultimate canonization authority to the pope.
The method used today reflects a process developed since the 13th century, reformed in the 1600s, enshrined in canon law in the early 20th century and reformed again under Pope John Paul II in 1983.
While elements of the process have been simplified and made more speedy, that is only in relative terms; declaring saints remains a painstaking affair. The rare candidate on the fast track might move from start to sainthood in just under 30 years, Seitz said. The longer causes go on and on. Hundreds stall at the midpoint of beatification, either for lack of a verifiable miracle or the support necessary to bring such information to the Vatican's attention.
Canonization, Seitz said, is "the way the church identifies those who have lived uniquely and remarkably their life in Christ. ... In their single-mindedness, in their dedication to Christ, they could be a model."
