- This event has passed.
Saint Damien of Molokai
May 10
Missionary. Born in Tremelo, Belgium, in 1840, Joseph de Veuster, left school at 13 to help on the family farm. He entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary six years later, taking the name of a fourth-century physician and martyr. When his brother Pamphile, a priest in the same congregation, fell ill and was unable to go to the Hawaiian Islands as assigned, Damien quickly volunteered in his place. In May 1864, two months after arriving in his new mission, Damien was ordained a priest in Honolulu and assigned to the island of Hawaii.
In 1873, he went to the Hawaiian government’s leper colony on the island of Molokai, set up seven years earlier. Part of a team of four chaplains taking that assignment for three months each year, Damien soon volunteered to remain permanently, caring for the people’s physical, medical, and spiritual needs. In time, he became their most effective advocate to obtain promised government support.
Under Fr Damien’s care, the settlement soon had new houses and a new church, school and orphanage. Morale improved considerably. A few years later, he succeeded in getting the Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse, led by Mother Marianne Cope, to help staff this colony in Kalaupapa. The author Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in Samoa, was a friend and wrote about him. ( See Stevenson’s OPEN LETTER in which he defended Fr Damian from a critic.
Damien contracted leprosy himself eventually and died on 15 April 1889. He was just 49 years old.
President Barack Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, said: “In our own time as millions around the world suffer from disease, especially the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, we should draw on the example of Fr Damien’s resolve in answering the urgent call to heal and care for the sick.”
Damien was beautified by St Pope John Paul II in 1995 and canonized by Pope Benedict on 11 October 2009.
See a film on the life of St Damian here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AweoZYsiCu4
