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February 14, 2019
Christina Gray
Evangeline Carlos of San Mateo learned she had metastatic lung cancer after applying for a nursing assistant job that required a chest X-ray as part of the hiring process.
Carlos, a parishioner of Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Belmont, was looking forward to working with children after caring for a terminally ill cancer patient when she received her diagnosis in March of 2017.
“I was so angry at God,” said Carlos, 61, who offered one of the readings at the World Day of the Sick Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral Feb. 2. “I’d been taking care of people for years including my mother who had returned to the Philippines. Now I was sick and all alone.”
The Archdiocese of San Francisco’s World Day of the Sick Mass has been hosted annually since 2008 by local members of the Western Association of the Order of Malta. The lay Catholic order of uniformed Knights and Dames of Malta defend the faith and care for the poor and sick in 120 countries. Each year the order takes a group of the afflicted chosen by application to the healing waters of Lourdes.
Central to the Mass held on or near the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes on Feb. 11 is the sacrament of the sick for those suffering from illness, anointing of the hands of caregivers and a sprinkled blessing of all in attendance with holy water from Lourdes.
Catholic San Francisco talked with Carlos and others about the physical and spiritual challenges of living with a chronic or life-threatening illness after the Mass concelebrated by Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone and nearly a dozen local priests.
Her daily dose of oral chemotherapy has compromised her ability to work, drive or fit into her clothing, said Carlos. She couldn’t afford to stay in the home she shared with her mother and now lives in a single rented room.
Carlos said daily Mass, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and the rosary is helping her cope with the physical, emotional and spiritual distress of her condition.
She found herself asking God why she must go through so much pain until a film on the Shroud of Turin shown by her parish humbled her.
“When I saw how the crown of thorns had been pushed down into Christ’s scalp to amplify his pain,” she said, “I told him Lord, whatever pain I have is nothing compared to yours.”
Last year, Carlos traveled to Lourdes with the Order of Malta, an experience she’s holding in memory as she waits to get test results about two new nodules found in her lungs.
“When I went to Lourdes I got a gift I cannot repay,” said Ken Ryan, a Knight of Malta who was diagnosed in 1999 with Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Ryan, who is master of properties for the San Francisco Ballet, said he doesn’t know if the six cycles of chemotherapy, the stem cell transplant, the radiation or the pilgrimage to Lourdes in 2001 is the reason he is cancer-free almost 20 years later.
“What I tell people is that everyone who goes to Lourdes gets a miracle,” he said. “It may not be the one you want but you’ll get what you need.”
Helping the “malade,” a French word for the sick used by the Order of Malta, is “his passion,” he said, despite his “dream job” with the ballet. He is the primary organizer of San Francisco’s World Day of the Sick Mass.
Bill Widmer, a Church of the Nativity parishioner, has been to Lourdes four times. The first three times he served sick pilgrims; the fourth time he was one.
When he was diagnosed with a rare form of a common cancer in 2017, it was Widmer’s turn to be pushed in the traditional wheeled carts for the sick at Lourdes.
“There are times I get down,” said Widmer, 63, who is a professor of operations management at Menlo College in Atherton.
But he said the upside of having a serious illness is that you are “happy for every day” and “hear the Gospel like it was written for you.”