Dolf Dormans’ small intestines had been practically destroyed by acid oozing from a ruptured appendix. Surgeons, attempting to close holes which had opened up, found that the slightest knock caused new leaks. It had reached the point at which nothing could be done for him. A doctor sat down with his family to tell them the worst: that Mr Dormans, a husband, father and grandfather, was going die an unpleasant death in a short time and they had better prepare themselves for it.

Mr Dormans did not die, however, but woke from a deep coma a day after he grasped a relic of Blessed Charles of St Andrew Houben – also known as Charles of Mount Argus – and prayed to him to intercede with God to spare his life. The sudden and medically inexplicable recovery that followed baffled doctors but for the Catholic Church this was the supernatural sign from God that was needed to declare Blessed Charles a saint.

On 3 June 2007, Pope Benedict XVI canonised Blessed Charles during a ceremony in St Peter’s Square, Rome, and Mr Dormans was alive to witness it. Also in the crowd were many thousands of Irish pilgrims.

This is because St Charles, though a Dutchman, lived out his priestly life primarily in Dublin, where he ministered to the poor and infirm and developed a reputation as a confessor and healer of body and spirit. He was adopted by the Irish as one of their own. In turn, Charles referred to the Irish as “my people”.

St Charles was born in 1821, the fourth of 11 children, to a couple who lived in Munstergeleen, a village in southeast Holland, and was baptised Johannes Andreas Houben. As a child he had wanted to be a priest and he came across the Passionists while serving in the Dutch army. Against the advice of his father, he joined their novitiate at Ere, Belgium, adopting the name Charles.

He was ordained in 1850 and sent to work in England two years later. In 1857, at the age of 35, he arrived in Ireland, at the newly-founded Passionist monastery of Mount Argus at Harold’s Cross, Dublin.

Although his arrival in Ireland marked the start of his ministry in earnest, his story begins much earlier. His labours crowned the efforts of other men going back at least to founding of the Passionist order in the 18th century by St Paul of the Cross to preach reconciliation with the God of love revealed in the Passion and death of Jesus Christ. St Paul longed not only for the conversion of England but of all the countries of the British Isles.

This mission was later zealously taken up by Italian priest Blessed Dominic Barberi, at whose hands the future St John Henry Newman was received into the Catholic Church in 1845.

Their contemporary was the aristocratic Fr George Spencer, the great-great-great uncle of Diana, Princess of Wales, and a great uncle of Winston Churchill, a convert who was welcomed into the Passionists by Blessed Dominic in 1846, taking the name Ignatius.

This man, who grew up in the ancestral family home of Althorp, the place where Lady Diana was buried in 1999, had been a priest for 10 years before Dominic arrived in England in 1840. He knew Newman even before his conversion and was so close a collaborator with Dominic that it was seen fit that were entombed alongside each other in the Passionist church in St Helens, Lancashire, where Mother Elizabeth Prout, the Shrewsbury-born founder of the Passionist Sisters also lies.

Like St Charles, Father Spencer had a great affinity for the Irish, which he had developed from ministering to them as a parish priest in the English Midlands. He said in a letter to his father that his time hunting rabbits on the Althorp estate had not been wasted because “I now spend my time hunting the Irish in their warrens”, a reference to the migrants who had made their homes in caves they had burrowed into the slagheaps around Tipton, Darlaston, Dudley and West Bromwich.

Father Spencer had the idea that England could be converted by the Irish, but first they needed to be “sanctified” themselves. He set off on his first tour of Ireland in 1842, and was to make repeated journeys there, preaching “little missions” and trying to help victims of the famine.

St John Henry Newman later joined the cause, making a total of 56 visits while helping to establish the Catholic University of Ireland, now University College Dublin, of which he was first rector.

St Charles was effectively continuing the work they started, rising to prominence as others began to fade. He arrived in the Dublin the same year Newman decided to leave the city. By then, Blessed Dominic had been dead eight years and Ignatius Spencer, who is believed to have spent time with Charles at a Passionist community near Stone, Staffordshire, was in the twilight of his life, weakened by bouts of consumption and rheumatism.

Dublin itself was a mess. It had fewer than 250,000 people but was awash with British soldiers. Brothels and shebeens were common and so were murders and drunkenness. Three hundred years of persecution had driven the Catholic Church underground and the faith was transmitted largely by word of mouth from parents to children. Although the bulk of the population hung on to the old faith their religious knowledge was often as hopeless as the prevailing moral standards.

St Charles was essentially a man of compassion who had fallen in love with the Irish from his first encounter with migrants in London who had fled the famine but who could not afford the passage to America.

He was not blind to their faults but sought to reconcile them to God. He was not considered an outstanding preacher and never really mastered the English language but he excelled in the confessional and in the care of the sick, including the depressed and the mentally ill. His reputation for healing and holiness spread rapidly and soon people were coming to him from all over the country. Some of those who could not reach him sent carriages to take him to their homes.

It was not unusual for crowds of hundreds to call at the monastery simply to ask for his blessing.

It was a great shock therefore when in 1866 he was ordered back to England after doctors accused him of instructing people not to seek medical advice for their ailments.

Their complaints had been compounded by the scandal of opportunists who had been selling holy water which they claimed – wrongfully – he had blessed, leaving him open to accusations of simony. St Charles had never endorsed such activities.

He remained in England for eight years, unable to work any miracles there, until he was allowed to return to Dublin in 1874. Almost instantly, many of the sick and the distressed sought him out, including a six-year-old boy said to have been healed by the priest from blindness caused by stones sent flying into the air by passing carriages.

When St Charles died in 1893, at the age of 71, he was given a state funeral said to be grander than that of the so-called “uncrowned king of Ireland”, Charles Stewart Parnell, two years earlier.

A cult – the first indication of sainthood – grew around St Charles almost immediately, and after his grave became a place of pilgrimage his remains were moved inside the Mount Argus church.

He was declared Venerable in 1979 by Pope St John Paul II, who also beatified him in 1988 following the cure of a Dutch woman who suffered from a large inoperable growth in her stomach.

The cure of Mr Dormans then took place in St Charles’s home village of Munstergeleen in April 1999.

During the Mass of Canonisation, Pope Benedict said that in St Charles the love of God “overflowed in a life totally dedicated to the care of souls”.

“During his many years of priestly ministry in England and Ireland, the people flocked to him to seek out his wise counsel, his compassionate care and his healing touch,” said the Pope.

“In the sick and the suffering he recognised the face of the crucified Christ, to whom he had a lifelong devotion. He drank deeply from the rivers of living water that poured forth from the side of the Pierced One, and in the power of the Spirit he bore witness before the world to the Father’s love.

“At the funeral of this much-loved priest, affectionately known as Fr Charles of Mount Argus, his superior was moved to observe: ‘The people have already declared him a saint’.”