The Honolulu Advertiser has word that the late Blessed Father Damien de Veuster the “leper priest of Moloka’i” has cleared a hurdle on the way to sainthood. According to Rome, a medical committee that’s part of the Vatican’s Congregation For the Causes of Saints has approved the Belgian priest’s second miracle. Now a theological committee reviews the medical committee’s work. Never let it be said that the Vatican acts impetuously.

His first, the cure of a French nun a century ago, has already been cleared by the Vatican.

Father Damien’s second miracle, curing a Honolulu woman suffering from lung cancer, has already been approved (and written up in the Hawai’i Medical Journal in 2000 under the felicitous title “Complete spontaneous regression of cancer.”)

Patrick Downes, a spokesman for the diocese called the medical committee’s ruling “a significant step.”

“A lot of causes don’t make it beyond the `authentic miracle’ part,” he said.