Saint Damien Joseph de Veuster of Molokai

1840 - 1889

May 10

Born January 3, 1840 at Tremeloo, Belgium; died April 15, 1889; declared venerable by Pope Pius VI in 1977; canonized by Pope John Paul II on June 3, 1995.
Joseph de Veuster studied at the College of Braine-le-Comte, and in 1860 joined the Fathers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (the Picpus Fathers), taking the name Damien. While still a novice in a Parisien monastery, volunteered for missionary work in the southern seas, and was refused because he was not yet ordained, but when one who should have gone was prevented through illness, Damien was allowed to go in his stead. His superiors need not have feared, for of the ten monks who sailed for Hawaii in 1864, Damien's name and work to outlive them all.

Damien was ordained in Honolulu two months after his arrival and was given a remote parish covering an area as large as his native Belgium, in a barren and volcanic land, where with no white colleague and no church building he began his work. He worked for nine years to evangelize the peoples of Puno and Kohala.

First he labored with his own hands under a blazing sun to build a chapel, then visited his parish from end to end, journeying past the craters and lakes of fire and through the sulphurous fumes or the mud which followed torrential rains. Often he took his life in his hands, as when once at midnight he burst into a secret burial cave where 30 natives were engaged in a ghoulish ritual. Without hesitation he interrupted the ceremony, spilling their vessels of animal blood and with angry scorn tearing to shreds their pagan symbols.

He is remembered most for his work among the lepers of Molokai, where the authorities had established a self-supporting leper settlement to which all who had contracted the high-contagious disease were compulsorily deported and where under appalling conditions they were left to their fate. When the call came in 1873 for a priest for Molokai, with the proviso that under new government regulations he must remain there for life, though whoever volunteered to go was almost certain to contract and die of the disease, Damien pleaded for the post.

Within an hour he was on his way. At Honolulu he transferred to a ship carrying 50 lepers, and at Molokai he was greeted by his new parishioners, who lined the beach in the last stages of disease and despair. He found only one hopeful sign among the squalor of his new surroundings--a rude wooden chapel, where his first act was to kneel in prayer. He spent that night in cleaning it, and was disturbed by the drunken laughter of the dissolute--for it was a lawless community, by the cries of the dying, and by the howling of the wild dogs that devoured the dead.

There follows the epic of his transformation of this living hell. In 1885, at the age of 49 he himself caught the disease, but crippled and deformed, he carried on, refusing to be transshipped for treatment. Before he died, four other priests and a band of nurses had joined him, and under his influence the island of death became a civilized welfare community.

Though he was often slandered during his lifetime, his holiness and dedication were quickly recognized after his death. (Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an impassioned defense of his character in 1905, which was used to support the canonization.) His body was brought home, and this man who was born a peasant and had spent his life, and sacrificed it, among the banished lepers of Molokai, was buried like a prince in Antwerp Cathedral (Delaney, Gill).