By Jessica Easthope
In a crowd of hundreds, Deacon Michael Chirichella stops to bless and pray over people at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Feast.
He’s done it countless times, knowing how much of a difference it can make.
“One of the deacons in charge of the retreat said to me, ‘Michael, stand up, turn your chair around and face your brother deacons,’ and they all laid hands on me, one by one,” Deacon Chirichella said.
He was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Even after surgery to remove tumors, his doctor said he would have to take out his bladder, prostate, and maybe more. It was hard to have hope then; something, or rather someone, showed up.
“Around that time, somebody delivered a small statue to my brother’s church, St. Joseph’s in Astoria. My brother, Father Vincent Chirichella, had no idea who this statue was. Who sent it,” Deacon Chirichella said. “His maintenance man brought it in, and they opened it up, and they said, ‘Wow. This is, I don’t know who it is.'”
And with that mysterious package, a devotion was born. Deacon Chirichella said that through the intercession of St. Charbel, his cancer was healed.
“Going on three years now, I’m cancer free,” Deacon Chirichella said. “It was really just a miracle from this saint that I never heard of before, and then I came up to the point of, ‘Now what?’”
With more than 30,000 miracles attributed to him—the most of any saint—St. Charbel, a Lebanese monk who lived in the late 1800s, became a core part of Deacon Chirichella’s life, and the life of his family.
When Deacon Chirichella’s cousin, Mary Giudice, lost her sight in her right eye after stress and multiple surgeries for a knee replacement gone wrong, he knew which saint to bring her.
“They gave me every test possible, they sent me to specialist after specialist, and they said I had an eye stroke and there was nothing they could do,” Giudice said. “My eye was completely black.”
“She’s the matriarch of our family, and really, she, like me, got knocked out of the box,” Deacon Chirichella said. “In other words, she couldn’t do anything. I went over to her house, etc.”
“I started blessing my eye with the oil,” Giudice said. “I’d make the sign of the cross, and two, three weeks later, I started to see again.”
Deacon Chirichella and Mary’s healings are now documented with the Family of St. Charbel USA, but their devotion is just beginning.
St. Charbel’s Feast Day is this Wednesday, July 24.
Brooklyn Auxiliary Bishop Raymond Chappetto is celebrating a Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Astoria.
The liturgy begins at 7:30, and relics will also be on display for people to venerate.