VIDEO:  Cancer cured by prayer

The Archdiocese of Baltimore plans to investigate whether an Annapolis woman’s cure from cancer was a miracle, a possible step toward sainthood for a 19th-century priest.

Mary Ellen Heibel, 71, was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2004 and early 2005 for malignant tumors in her lungs, liver, stomach and chest.

She said she’s never forgotten the day she was diagnosed. “Walter Reed (Medical Center) told me to go home and die on May 11, 2004. They said I had six months to live,“ Mary Ellen Heibel said.

After she was diagnosed, Heibel was told by Johns Hopkins that chemotherapy was the only treatment. She started chemotherapy and began praying to Francis X. Seelos and urging others to pray as well.

A few months later, she got good news. “He said, ‘Your tumors are all gone.‘ From the time I started the novenas to the time I got the last CAT scan, the cancer had disappeared,“ Heibel said.

Heibel, who experienced a recovery her doctors did not expect and couldn’t explain, said she continues to pray to the priest, who served in Maryland before dying in Louisiana while treating yellow fever victims.

The doctor who treated Heibel at Johns Hopkins has since moved on, but he has reportedly said chemotherapy doesn’t entirely account for what happened to her.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore plans to begin investigating the case in a few weeks, marking only the fifth such investigation in its history. Seelos has already been credited with one miracle.

“This would be the second miracle required of the church before someone could be formally canonized as a saint,“ said Father Gilbert Seitz, the judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The investigation will decide if Heibel was healed through the intercession of Seelos, who was a pastor at Baltimore’s St. Alphonsus Church from 1854 to 1857 and worked at various parishes throughout Maryland.

“There will be a panel of medical experts, a chair of surgery from Mercy Medical Center and another lawyer besides myself. We’ll talk to 11 or 12 people and the people involved in her care,“ Seitz said.

Heibel said no matter what the outcome of the investigation is, she knows what happened in her heart.

“Try it if you’re a non-believer. It won’t hurt. You have to try it. The only one who can heal you is the Lord,“ she said.

The information gathered by the panel of experts will be sent to Rome for review by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. That panel will then make a recommendation to Pope Benedict after their investigation.

It’s up to the Pope to decide if what happened was a miraculous healing.