When the doctor says the word, the world shifts on a hidden axis.

Cancer.

Everything before, and everything after.

In this gentle, substantive companion, A Servant of God brings to the cancer patient, and to the family members and friends who walk beside them, one of the great saints of the Christian tradition: Saint Peregrine Laziosi of the Servite Order, patron of those afflicted with cancer. Saint Peregrine himself faced the surgeon's blade with a frightened heart. The night before his scheduled amputation, he dragged himself to the chapel crucifix and prayed through the long hours. By morning, the cancer that had consumed his foot was gone.

But this is not a book that promises cure. The Christian tradition has never promised cure. What it promises is companionship through the long night of diagnosis, through the brutal weeks of treatment, through the question of why, through the silence when prayer becomes impossible, and through, if it should come to it, the holy passage of death.

Across eleven chapters and four appendices, this book offers: