Dr. Juan Villagomez; Beloved West L.A. Family Practitioner Honored by Pope

Dr. Juan Villagomez, a well-loved family practice physician whose three-year struggle with stomach cancer touched people from his West Los Angeles community all the way to the Vatican, died Thursday. He was 41.

Though he struggled at the end just to breathe, Villagomez was overjoyed to learn from his hospital bed last month that the pope had conferred on him one of the highest awards a layperson can receive, Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, for his life service to humanity.

His reaction was typically humble. “I was stunned,” he said. “Stunned and speechless.”

His friends were happy too, but not overly surprised.

“He was a good example of someone who . . . wanted the world to be a better place,” said Martha Duran-Contreras, Villagomez’s patient and friend of 12 years. “He worked very hard at doing that, and at the same time he made his friends feel loved and always had time for them.”

Msgr. Lloyd Torgerson of St. Monica’s Catholic Church said the doctor was bright and strong-willed--”Look what he went through!”--but most of all, he had “this huge heart.”

The eldest son of Mexican immigrants, Villagomez “always remembered where he came from. . . . He was once a poor man and he kept that in his heart,” Torgerson said.

Rita Esquivel, a friend whom Villagomez and his wife, Alicia, affectionately called comadre, said he was the kind of doctor who inspired strong love and loyalty in his mostly elderly patients.

“When his children were born, forget it . . . you couldn’t get into the office there were so many gifts,” Esquivel said in a profile of Villagomez in The Times this year.

Forced to quit practicing last year, the doctor missed his patients. In a series of interviews this spring, he confided that he had trouble with the transformation from healer to patient. His journey, as he described his illness, challenged his faith, both in medicine and in God.

Yet, even as his health slipped away, he never lost his religious devotion. He prayed every day to the Virgin Mary, asking for a miracle. He learned from a friend just the right way to say the rosary. He wore a rosary blessed by the pope around his neck, over his hospital gown.

Villagomez struggled most of all with the prospect of leaving his young family--his wife and two children, Bobby, 6, and Gabby, 4. During the last year the four of them spent as much time together as possible.

At St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, where Villagomez was repeatedly hospitalized, the children would visit him after school, sitting beside him in his bed. Bobby liked to run toys through his hair, Gabby to give him little kisses (“besitos”) when he asked for them.

Villagomez wanted his children to know him. In videotapes and long letters, he told them his life story and shared his musings for them to review when they are older. He explained in detail how he had learned to work hard as a boy during Northern California harvests.

“I am always praying for my health, praying for my family, praying for my wife and my children,” he said in April.

Besides his wife, son and daughter, Villagomez is survived by his father, Jesus, and mother, Amelia, both of Geyserville, Calif.; his brothers, Manuel of Oakland, Jose and Salvador of Los Angeles, and Jess of Oxnard; and his sisters, Amelia James of Santa Rosa, and Adeline Mandujano of Healdsburg, Calif.

A vigil service is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Monica’s Church. The funeral will be at 10 a.m. Monday, with interment at Woodlawn Cemetery.