Pure luck? Whatever you think, the Boudreaux family, including now married and healthy Angela Marie, credit God and the intercession of Francis Xavier Seelos.
In 1983, the family believes, they received a fourth cure through the one-time missionary for son Andre, then twenty five.
Working eighteen hours a day in New Orleans’s French Quarter, at about 9 P.m. on December 19, Andre left the restaurant where he was maitre d’, walking over to his second job on Bourbon Street. Suddenly, two thugs cornered him, sat on him, and shot him in the face, while robbing him of the two hundred dollars in his pocket.
Somehow Andre got to his feet and ran back to the restaurant, blood streaming from the gunshot wound, which missed his eye by half an inch. Stumbling in the door, in spite of his injured tongue and missing teeth, he managed to gasp to security men, “Call the paramedics.”
By the time he was examined in a hospital, his head was swollen three times normal size, and he was in danger of suffocation. Doctors desired to do a tracheotomy, that is to cut into the trachea, or windpipe, through the neck to permit the body air intake that way; but they wanted Andre’s parents’ permission as next of kin.
His mother took the phone call at the Boudreaux home in Gretna. She recalls she began at once to pray aloud for the intercession of Father Seelos. Immediately, she remembers, a sense of “calm came over me.”
Driving toward New Orleans, she shushed her husband, Melvin, who was screaming and swearing in anger at the thieves and grief over his son, so she could focus on praying. In the middle of crossing a particular bridge, she recalls plainly four years later, Father Seelos, as God’s messenger, seemed to say, “Tell your son when you go in [to see him], he doesn’t need the operation; he’ll be fine.”
At the hospital the parents found their son’s friends gathered, weeping. Angela calmed them with assurances that Andre was not going to die. Her words may have seemed a mother’s need to deny reality, for another young man brought in that night who had been shot in the face with the same-type bullet died the next day.
“Andre should have died three times,” the mother says she believes. But as far as she was concerned then and now, Father Seelos had given her a word from God — and she believed it.
After prayer and telling her son he didn’t need the tracheotomy, Angela went home and peacefully to sleep, to her husband’s amazement. More typical of the parent whose child has just been shot, Melvin walked the floor.
Unable to talk or eat — he lost sixteen pounds almost overnight — and such a sight that his sister had nightmares after seeing him, Andre had only reassurance from his mother that, however things seemed, he was going to be fine.
She was right.
Hospitalized the night of December 19, on December 23 he was discharged. Christmas Eve he was in church with the rest of the family — giving God thanks for his life.
Today there is not even a scar to show Andre Boudreaux was once shot in the face at close range.
Not long after the murderous attack on his son, Melvin Boudreaux developed a rare tropical skin disease that can be fatal; after more requests to the “family saint” for his prayers, Dr. Terezakis was able to control it with medication.
Perhaps it was at this point God decided this family needed the mother in a particular kind of supportive environment. Perhaps Father Seelos had simply become especially fond of some of his “best clients.”
All Angela knows is she found herself unhappy in her job because of the racial injustice there. A woman of prayer, she asked God to get her out of such an un-christian situation, as usual asking Father Seelos’ intercession.
In answer, the firm decided to discharge two of their three secretaries, Angela among them. Three days later came a call form the Seelos Center wondering if she would take the secretaries job there.
Are ducks drawn to water?
With Angela now able to make her exuberant volunteer efforts vocational as well, it seems only a matter of time before the prayer power of Father Francis Xavier Seelos becomes a household word.
This article is taken from “Nothing Short of A Miracle,”
a book on the healing power of the saints, by Patricia Treece. This
can be ordered through the Seelos Center
or directly through Amazon.com.
Two of the chapters are on Father Seelos.