An Italian Servite friar of Forlì whose reported miraculous cure of leg cancer made him the traditional patron of cancer patients.

Pellegrino Laziosi was an Italian religious of the Order of Friar Servants of Mary, the Servites, who died at Forlì on May 1, 1345, at about seventy-nine years old. He is venerated especially as patron of those suffering from cancer, after tradition holds his own leg tumor was healed without surgery.

Quick Facts

• Died: May 1, 1345, Forlì, Italy (about age 79)
• Venerated as: Monastic or consecrated witness
• Beatified: 1702
• Canonized: 1726
• Patron of: those suffering from cancer

Who Was Saint Pellegrino Laziosi?

Pellegrino Laziosi joined the Servite order, founded in devotion to the sorrows of Our Lady, after a conversion from an earlier life of political violence in Forlì’s factional conflicts; tradition credits Saint Philip Benizi, a leading figure in the order, with helping bring about that conversion. Pellegrino spent decades as a Servite friar known for penance, preaching, and care of the sick.

Historical Setting

Fourteenth-century Italy’s city-states were riven by factional and papal-imperial conflict, and Forlì in Pellegrino’s youth was no exception; his path from involvement in that violence to a long religious life reflects a broader pattern of medieval conversion stories in which political and personal turmoil gave way to a vocation of penance.

Why the Church Remembers Saint Pellegrino Laziosi

Pellegrino Laziosi is remembered chiefly for the tradition that a severe, apparently cancerous growth on his leg, for which surgery had been proposed, healed overnight after a night of prayer before a crucifix — an account that, true to its details or not, established his enduring patronage of those suffering from cancer and other serious illness.

Canonization and Feast Day

Pellegrino Laziosi was beatified in 1702 and canonized in 1726. His feast is kept on May 1 (or May 4 in some calendars), and he remains one of the most widely invoked patrons for those undergoing cancer treatment.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

Pellegrino’s path from a life of factional violence to decades of quiet penitential service shows that no past is considered by the Church too compromised for a genuine later vocation to holiness — conversion, however late, is always credited as real.

A Prayer to Saint Pellegrino Laziosi

Saint Pellegrino Laziosi, healed in body through faith and transformed in soul through penance, intercede for all who suffer from cancer and serious illness today, and for their families walking that difficult road with them. Amen.

Sources

• Butler’s Lives of the Saints
• New Advent, Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Peregrine Laziosi”
• Roman Martyrology, May 1