Faith in History / Sean Gallagher

St. Damien of Molokai gave himself in service to a Hawaiian leper colony

The stories of two American saints, St. Damien of Molokai and St. Marianne Cope, are intertwined, showing us how God’s grace flows from person to person and how we can thus be the means of the sanctification of other people.

We’ll explore the life of St. Damien in this column and St. Marianne’s in the next.

St. Damien of Molokai was born on Jan. 3, 1840, in Belgium as Jozef De Veuster. At 18, he joined the Fathers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the religious order in which his older brother Auguste was a member. As a novice, Jozef was given Damien as his religious name.

He dreamed of becoming a missionary and got the chance to fulfill it when Auguste, who was supposed to be sent to Hawaii, became ill. Damien volunteered to take his place and departed in 1864 for the Pacific island nation, then an independent kingdom. He was ordained a priest in Honolulu on May 21 of that year.

At first, Father Damien did parish ministry on the island of Hawaii. There, he observed how the native Hawaiians were suffering from a variety of diseases brought to the islands by outsiders both from Europe and Asia.

One of those conditions was leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease. It is a contagious bacterial illness that can lead to damage in the skin, nervous system, respiratory tract and eyes. While it is treatable now, before the development of antibiotics, it could easily lead to crippling disabilities and death.

Cultures and societies across history and the world have feared leprosy and sought to isolate those who suffer from it. Such was the case in Hawaii in the time of St. Damien. The year after he was ordained, the kingdom’s legislature passed a law quarantining those suffering from leprosy to an isolated colony on the island of Molokai.

The government supplied some food to the people sent there, but they received minimal health care—if any at all—and their living conditions were poor.

The bishop in Honolulu wanted the lepers on Molokai to have a priest to attend to their spiritual needs, but he also recognized the great personal risk involved.

Father Damien volunteered for the assignment and arrived at Molokai in 1873. While he was only supposed to stay there for four months, the priest himself and the residents of the colony soon requested that his ministry continue indefinitely.

Father Damien did all he could to address the many physical and spiritual needs of the colony’s residents, giving them medical care and working with them to build a church, homes and furniture. He also made coffins for those who died there and dug their graves. Through it all, Father Damien proclaimed the Gospel and taught the faith to the people.

Echoing and adapting the words of St. Paul, Father Damien wrote in 1873, six months after his arrival in Molokai, to Auguste, back in Europe, “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.”

Those words were figurative at that time, but they eventually became a reality. Father Damien contracted leprosy in 1885, succumbing to it in 1889 at the age of 49.

The source of his strength for his ministry at the leper colony, including after he became a leper himself, was the Eucharist. “Without the constant presence of our Divine Master, I would never be able to cast my lot with that of the lepers,” he wrote to Auguste.

Pope Benedict XVI declared Father Damien a saint in 2012. St. Damien of Molokai, pray for us. †