Feast day: May 10
St. Damien of Molokai
Belgian priest who volunteered for Hawaii's leper colony, built it into a community, contracted the disease, and died among his people.
Jozef De Veuster was born in 1840 to a Belgian farming family and joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, taking the name Damien. Still only a young brother, he volunteered to take his sick brother's place on the missions and sailed to the Hawaiian Islands, where he was ordained a priest and spent years in ordinary parish work among the native Hawaiians.
At that time leprosy was spreading through the islands, and the government's response was brutal: those who contracted it were torn from their families and exiled for life to an isolated settlement on the peninsula of Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai — a place without law, medicine, or hope, where the sick were left to fend for themselves and die. In 1873 Damien volunteered to go and live among them as their priest.
He gave them far more than the sacraments. He bound their wounds, built houses, churches, and coffins with his own hands, dug graves, organized farms and choirs and schools, and fought the authorities for medicine and supplies — and above all he restored to the outcasts their dignity, treating them as beloved children of God rather than as the living dead. He shared their life completely, even, famously, their cup and pipe.
After eleven years he contracted leprosy himself, and is said to have begun a sermon thereafter not with 'my brethren' but with 'we lepers.' He worked on among them until the disease killed him in 1889. Long honored as a hero of charity, he was canonized in 2009, and is a patron of those with leprosy and HIV and of all outcasts.
His sermon greeting changed one Sunday from 'My dear brethren' to 'We lepers.' He had chosen to share everything — including the disease.
“I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.”
— St. Damien of Molokai
Image: William Brigham (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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