Father Damien

Father Damien, born Jozef De Veuster on 3 January 1840 in Tremelo, Flemish Brabant, Belgium, was one of eight children of the Flemish grain merchant Frans De Veuster and his wife Anne-Catherine Wouters. After leaving school at about the age of thirteen to work on the family farm, he followed his older brother Auguste (in religion Father Pamphile) into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, entering the novitiate at Leuven in 1859 and taking the name Damien. Superiors at first considered him poorly suited to studies for the priesthood, but he persevered in Latin and theology. When Pamphile was prevented by illness from sailing to the Hawaiian mission, Damien volunteered to go in his stead. He left Europe in 1863 as a religious brother and was ordained a priest in Honolulu on 21 May 1864 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.

Damien’s first assignments were on the island of Hawaii, in the districts of Puna and later Kohala-Hamakua, where he learned the Hawaiian language, built chapels, and traveled extensively on horseback to scattered Catholic communities. In 1865 the Kingdom of Hawaii had begun to isolate persons diagnosed with leprosy on the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai. By the early 1870s the settlement at Kalawao suffered from shortages of food, shelter, and medical care. In 1873 Bishop Louis Maigret sought priests willing to serve there. Damien volunteered, landed on 10 May 1873, and soon obtained permission to remain indefinitely rather than serve on a rotating basis. He lived among the patients, calling himself one of them, and undertook both pastoral and practical work: constructing and repairing houses, an orphanage, and a hospital; enlarging St. Philomena Church; organizing farming and a water supply; making coffins and burying the dead; and dressing wounds as well as celebrating Mass and hearing confessions.

In late 1884 Damien observed the first symptoms of leprosy in himself; the disease was confirmed in 1885. He continued his ministry as a patient until he became too weak to work. He died on 15 April 1889 at the age of forty-nine and was buried in the cemetery beside St. Philomena Church at Kalawao. His example attracted worldwide attention. After a Honolulu clergyman published a critical letter, Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited the settlement, issued a widely read defense of Damien in 1890. King Kalakaua had earlier decorated him as a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Kalakaua. In 1936 Damien’s remains were transferred from Molokai to the crypt of the Congregation’s church in Leuven, Belgium; following his beatification, his right hand was returned to Molokai as a relic in 1995.

Pope John Paul II beatified Damien in Brussels on 4 June 1995, and Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in Saint Peter’s Square on 11 October 2009. The Roman Catholic Church keeps his feast on 10 May, the date of his arrival on Molokai. He is venerated as patron of people living with leprosy and with HIV and AIDS, of those who are socially outcast, of the State of Hawaii, and of the Diocese of Honolulu. The State of Hawaii observes 15 April as Father Damien Day. His life has been cited as an inspiration by figures including Mahatma Gandhi, and he remains one of the best-known missionary saints of the nineteenth century.