AP Photo
Audrey Toguchi, 80-year-old of Hawaii, seen, during a press conference in Rome Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009, on the occasion of the canonization ceremony of the Belgium-born priest Father Damien which will be celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican Sunday. Toguchi, in Rome for the ceremony, says Father Damien's work with leprosy patients on a Hawaiian island in the 19th century showed people they are all special. Damien's birth name was Jozef De Veuster. He was beloved by the lepers he ministered to for 16 years before he died of the disease himself in 1889. Pope Benedict XVI decided that Toguchi's apparently inexplicable healing from what doctors had described as terminal cancer was a miracle wrought through Damien's intercession.
