St. Damien of Molokai

St. Damien of Molokai was a Belgian missionary priest, born Jozef De Veuster in 1840, who spent the last sixteen years of his life serving the people forcibly isolated with leprosy at Kalaupapa on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. He arrived there in 1873 knowing that the assignment was open-ended and probably fatal, contracted the disease himself around 1884, and died among the people he served in 1889 at the age of forty-nine. Pope Benedict XVI canonised him in 2009, and his feast is kept on 10 May, the date he first landed on the peninsula.

Damien is unusual among saints in how well documented he is. He wrote letters, the Kingdom of Hawaii kept records, photographs of him survive, and both his admirers and his critics put their views in writing during his lifetime and immediately after. What follows is drawn from that record.

1. Who Damien Was

Jozef De Veuster was born on 3 January 1840 at Tremelo in Flanders, the seventh child of a farming family. He joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, known as the Picpus Fathers, and took the religious name Damien after an early Christian physician martyr.

He reached Hawaii by taking his brother's place. His older brother Pamphile, also a member of the congregation, had been assigned to the mission in the Hawaiian Islands and fell ill with typhus before sailing. Damien asked to go instead. He arrived at Honolulu in March 1864 and was ordained a priest there in May of the same year, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.

For nine years he worked as a parish missionary on the island of Hawaii, covering large districts on foot and on horseback and building chapels. He was physically strong, practical with his hands, and by every account, including his own, stubborn. That combination is most of what he had when he went to Molokai.

2. Hawaii, Leprosy and the Isolation Law

Leprosy, now called Hansen's disease, reached the Hawaiian Islands in the nineteenth century and spread through a population already devastated by imported infections. In 1865 the Kingdom of Hawaii passed a law providing for the compulsory isolation of people diagnosed with the disease.

The place chosen was the Kalaupapa peninsula on the north shore of Molokai, a flat shelf of land cut off from the rest of the island by sea cliffs among the highest in the world. Patients were shipped there, sometimes put over the side of a boat to swim ashore, and were not expected to return. Families were broken up by law. The first settlement was at Kalawao, on the wetter windward side.

Conditions in the early years were what happens when people are removed from society and then supplied inconsistently. Food and shelter were inadequate, there was no resident medical care, the dying were not looked after and the dead were buried badly or not at all. Some of the accounts of drunkenness and lawlessness were written by outsiders with reasons of their own, and the historians who work on Kalaupapa point out that the patients also organised themselves, elected leaders, married, farmed and held services. Both things were true.

The Bishop of Honolulu asked for priests willing to serve the settlement. Damien volunteered, along with three others, and the original plan was rotation. He arrived on 10 May 1873 and asked to stay permanently. He was thirty-three.

3. The Abandoned

In the 19th century, leprosy (Hansen's disease) was a death sentence. The Hawaiian government quarantined lepers on the isolated island of Molokai. They were dumped there to die, lawless and hopeless. Damien, a Belgian priest, volunteered to go.

What made the assignment different from ordinary hardship missionary work was the one-way character of it. Damien was not sent to visit. Church authorities and the Board of Health both restricted his movement in and out of the settlement, and for long stretches he was refused permission to leave, at one point including the ordinary Catholic provision of confession to another priest. On one recorded occasion he made his confession in French, shouted from the deck of a ship to a priest on shore, because he was not permitted to land.

He went anyway and stayed sixteen years. His letters to his family and his superiors say plainly that he expected to catch the disease and that he considered the risk part of the job.

4. Building a Community

Damien didn't just say Mass; he built houses, dug graves, dressed ulcers, and organized a band. He smoked a pipe to mask the smell of rotting flesh. He restored their dignity, teaching them that they were not cursed by God but beloved children.

The specifics are worth having. He enlarged the church of St. Philomena at Kalawao, which still stands. He organised the building of houses to replace shelters made of branches. He got a water supply piped from a valley source so the settlement was not dependent on carrying water. He made coffins, dug graves, and ran funerals with the full rites, which meant that people who had been sent there to be forgotten were buried by name. He set up a burial association so that the community itself took responsibility for the dead. He cleaned and bandaged ulcers with his own hands at a time when nobody knew how the disease was transmitted. He started schools and organised choirs and a band.

He was also a difficult colleague. He argued with the Board of Health, wrote over the heads of his superiors to get supplies, and irritated officials in Honolulu by publicising conditions at the settlement. His own religious superiors found him hard to manage. Sanctity in his case did not arrive as an even temperament.

5. "We Lepers"

One morning, after years of service, Damien accidentally spilled boiling water on his foot and felt no pain. He knew. He began his homily not with "My dear brethren," but "My fellow lepers." He died of the disease, surrounded by the people he loved.

The loss of sensation in the extremities is one of the characteristic effects of the disease, which attacks the peripheral nerves, and the account of him discovering it through scalding water is the one that has come down in the tradition. His illness was confirmed medically around 1884, five years before his death.

He worked on. In his last years he pressed harder for supplies and for helpers, knowing that he would not be there long, and the arrival of Mother Marianne Cope and her sisters in the final months meant the work would continue. He died at Kalawao on 15 April 1889, at forty-nine, and was buried there under the pandanus tree where he had slept during his first weeks on the peninsula.

6. He Was Not the Only One There

Damien became famous, and the fame has crowded out the others. The Catholic record at Kalaupapa includes two more names that belong in it.

St. Marianne Cope was a German-born American Franciscan sister who led a group of sisters to Hawaii in 1883 to run hospitals, took charge of the home for girls and women at Kalaupapa, nursed Damien in his final illness, and stayed on the peninsula for thirty years until her death in 1918. She was canonised in 2012. None of the sisters who worked with her contracted the disease.

Joseph Dutton, born Ira Barnes Dutton, was an American Civil War veteran and a convert whose earlier life had come apart. He arrived at Kalaupapa in 1886, worked alongside Damien without pay, and remained on the peninsula for forty-four years until his death in 1931.

Alongside them were the patients themselves, who ran their own associations, taught, nursed each other and kept the settlement functioning. The Catholic story at Kalaupapa is a community's story.

7. What Happened After He Died

The attack, and Robert Louis Stevenson's answer

Shortly after Damien's death, a Presbyterian minister in Honolulu, Charles McEwen Hyde, wrote a private letter, later published, dismissing Damien as coarse, dirty and headstrong, and suggesting that he had contracted the disease through immorality. Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited Kalaupapa in 1889 and spoken with the people there, replied in 1890 with an open letter to Hyde that is still in print. Stevenson conceded the roughness and the stubbornness, and then set the accusation against what Damien had actually done and where Hyde had been while he did it. The letter did more than anything else to fix Damien's reputation in the English-speaking world.

His body

In 1936 the government of Belgium requested the return of his remains, and he was reburied at Leuven. In 1995, at the request of the people of Hawaii, his right hand was returned to Kalaupapa and reburied in his original grave.

Canonisation

Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1995. Pope Benedict XVI canonised him on 11 October 2009. The miracle accepted for the canonisation was the recovery of Audrey Toguchi, a Hawaii schoolteacher whose metastatic cancer went into a remission her doctors could not account for after she prayed at Damien's grave.

8. Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

His feast is 10 May, the date he landed at Kalaupapa, kept as an optional memorial in the United States and as a feast in Hawaii and in his congregation. Hawaii also marks Damien Day on 15 April, the day he died. His state statue stands in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, one of the two Hawaii sent.

He is invoked as a patron of people with Hansen's disease and, since the 1980s, of people living with HIV and AIDS, of outcasts of every kind, and of the state of Hawaii. The HIV patronage was taken up by Catholic hospitals, hospices and chaplaincies who found in Damien a model for staying with patients that other people would not touch.

Kalaupapa is now a national historical park. The isolation law was repealed in 1969, and a small number of former patients chose to remain in the place that had become their home. St. Philomena's church still stands at Kalawao.

9. Hansen's Disease Today

Hansen's disease is caused by a slow-growing bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, identified by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen in 1873, the same year Damien went to Molokai. It is only mildly contagious, most people have natural immunity to it, and prolonged close contact is generally needed for transmission. None of that was known in Damien's lifetime.

The disease is curable. Multidrug therapy has been available since the 1980s and is provided free through the World Health Organization. Treated early, it causes no disability. The disfigurement and nerve damage associated with it in the popular imagination are the results of untreated infection.

The stigma has outlived the medical problem, which is the part of Damien's story that has not become historical. Naming the disease after Hansen rather than using the biblical word is one deliberate attempt to break that link. The biblical term translated as leprosy covered a range of skin conditions and carried ritual as well as medical consequences, and it does not map exactly onto the modern diagnosis.

10. What a Reader Can Take From Him

Presence is the first thing you can give

Damien's decisive act was arriving and staying. Before the houses, the water pipe and the coffins, he lived where the people lived and ate what they ate. Almost everyone has someone in their life who is being avoided, and the beginning of the answer is turning up.

Touch the person

He dressed wounds with bare hands. Christ touched the leper before healing him (Mark 1:40 to 42), which the Gospel reports as a separate act from the cure. Contempt is communicated physically, and so is its opposite.

Bury the dead properly

Making coffins and digging graves was a large part of Damien's actual working day. Burying the dead is one of the corporal works of mercy, and it is the one that produces no gratitude from the person served. That is a good test of motive.

Difficult people can be holy

Damien was abrasive, argued with his superiors, and went around procedures to get supplies. The Church canonised him with the record intact. Waiting to become pleasant before becoming useful is a way of never starting.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

When is St. Damien of Molokai's feast day?

His feast day is 10 May, the date in 1873 when he first landed on the Kalaupapa peninsula. It is kept as an optional memorial in the calendar of the United States and with higher rank in Hawaii and in his own congregation, the Sacred Hearts Fathers. Hawaii separately observes Damien Day on 15 April, the anniversary of his death in 1889.

How did St. Damien catch leprosy?

Through prolonged close contact with patients over eleven years. He shared meals, dressed ulcers with his bare hands, and lived in the settlement rather than visiting it. Nobody in 1873 knew how the disease was transmitted. His illness was confirmed medically around 1884 and he died of it on 15 April 1889. An accusation made after his death that he had contracted it through immorality was answered in 1890 by Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited Kalaupapa and spoken with the people there.

What is St. Damien the patron saint of?

He is invoked as a patron of people with Hansen's disease, of people living with HIV and AIDS, of outcasts, and of the state of Hawaii. The HIV patronage was taken up in the 1980s by Catholic hospitals, hospices and chaplaincies who saw in him a model for staying present to patients that others avoided.

When was Damien of Molokai canonised?

Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1995 and Pope Benedict XVI canonised him on 11 October 2009. The miracle accepted for the canonisation was the recovery of Audrey Toguchi, a schoolteacher from Hawaii whose metastatic cancer went into a remission her doctors could not explain after she prayed at Damien's grave.

Where is St. Damien buried?

He was buried at Kalawao on Molokai in 1889. In 1936 his remains were returned to Belgium at the request of the Belgian government and reburied at Leuven, where his tomb is. In 1995, at the request of the people of Hawaii, his right hand was returned to Kalaupapa and reburied in his original grave, so that part of him lies in each place.

Is leprosy still incurable?

No. Hansen's disease has been curable since the development of effective drug treatment, and multidrug therapy has been available free through the World Health Organization since the 1980s. It is only mildly contagious, most people are naturally immune, and treated early it causes no disability. The disfigurement associated with it results from untreated infection, and the stigma has outlasted the medical problem.