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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).
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