The miracle could have happened anywhere. Blessed Damien, after all, is a revered figure from Brussels in his Belgian homeland, to Bhubaneswar in India, where clinics named for him today fight the scourge of the same bacillus he battled on Molokai. Besides, heaven knows no boundaries.

But it was for a dying former public school teacher in Aiea that the Belgian priest chose to intercede with God.

Apparently Damien, who arrived in Hawaii in 1864, who died here in 1889, and whose body was shipped back to Belgium in 1936, wanted to show he’s never left.

And God approved, in an astonishing way.

Even more astonishing, Blessed Damien’s obscure local favor has been transformed into universal affirmation of his energetic sacrificial charity. Because of Audrey Toguchi’s cure, Damien will be declared a saint.

Call it a collaboration of the communion of saints, beginning with Audrey’s gift from Damien, whom she calls “friend.” After praying to Blessed Damien at his gravesite and church in Kalaupapa, Toguchi was freed of a cancer that her doctor said no one ever survives.

That blessing, first shared with her family and physicians, was welcomed by a widening pool of recognition that drew in church officials, Vatican medical experts, bishops, cardinals and finally Pope Benedict XVI. Sometime next year, the world will celebrate.

Damien, the hearty son of a Belgian farmer, felt compelled to spread the Gospel in a volcanic island kingdom on the other side of his world. He volunteered to labor in a tiny putrid corner of God’s vineyard, transforming it by love and hard work, at the cost of his own life.

He practiced his heroic virtue in a place so remote that, even today, most people in Hawaii have never been there, demonstrating through his life and his death, as every saint has done, that all sanctity is local.

Those who say “at last, Damien deserves this” have their hearts in the right place, but really, one does not earn sainthood, one lives it. God gives it.

Those who say “this is an honor for Hawaii’s Catholics” are right to feel proud, but the church doesn’t elevate saints just so we can bask in the glow of someone else’s holiness. Rather saints are celebrated as men and women to imitate, as examples to follow.

As long as there are those our world chooses to shun, abandon and discard — the sick, the weak, the poor, the elderly, the unborn — others will be needed to step into their lives and embrace them. Damien has shown us how.

“Today, dear brothers and sisters, it is up to you to take up the torch of Father Damien,” Pope John Paul II said in his homily at Damien’s beatification in Brussels on June 4, 1995.

“His witness is a call for you, particularly for you young people, in order that you can all know him, and that, through his sacrifice, there shall grow within you the desire to love God, the source of all true love and every successful life and the desire to make of your life a genuine offering.”