understanding

I am not Catholic.

Father Damien

Yet I recognize the tremendous honor Pope Benedict XVI bestowed upon Father Damien De Veuster. Catholics
everywhere now recognize Father Damien, canonized on October 11, 2009, as a saint.

But, I am one who has already spent much of my life inspired by the life and work of Father Damien.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Father Damien, then I am honored to be the one to introduce you to this fine and noble man. He was born in 1840 in Belgium. Growing up he chose a religious life, eventually becoming a Roman Catholic

priest. While offering his energy in service to others he longed to travel and see other lands. Twists of life brought him to the Hawaiian Islands where the scourge of Hansen’s disease, more commonly known as leprosy, was ravaging the native population of the beautiful island chain.

This was a time of increasing global movement. Indigenous people throughout the globe lacked immunity to diseases existent in other parts of the world. They suffered devastatingly high death rates as sailing crews, travelers and traders inadvertently introduced numerous infectious diseases to these previously isolated populations. The Native Hawaiians suffered a similar, tortured fate. Leprosy was one, but the list of diseases included syphilis, influenza, smallpox, even measles, which in the decade of the 1850’s alone killed a full 20% of all the Hawaiian people living on the islands.

But leprosy was different. Today we know a bacterium, treatable with medication, transmits Hansen’s disease. Historically, however, it was not only untreatable, but misunderstanding also caused it to reek with connotations of a “cursed soul” or implications of “a punishment for sin”. The disease was interpreted as a divine judgment cast upon those who required extreme penance by bodily mortification.

Mind you, these were not the views of one single religion or culture. They were perceptions the world over and were, no doubt, born of the quite human tendency to vilify the things we fear. People so feared the severe physiological disfigurements of advanced leprosy that even tiny children with the disease were shunned and stigmatized, perceived as ill of spirit as much as body.

Father Damien saw otherwise.
Father Damien saw other.
Father Damien saw wise.

Hawaiian King Kamehameha V, confronting a public health crisis paramount in its proportions, created a government-funded medical quarantine on the island of Molokai to stem the continuing advance of the disease on the island chain. He assigned the area of Kalaupapa on Molokai to become the point of relocation. Kalaupapa is surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean and cut off from the rest of Molokai by 1600-foot sea cliffs.

Father Damien stepped on the shore of Molokai seven years after its establishment as a “leper colony”.
But Father Damien did not manage Molokai as an isolation ward nor did he view its citizenry as less than.

At the time of his arrival in 1873, the isolated shoreline of the relocation colony had fallen into lawlessness. Damien took it upon himself to begin enforcing basic rules of law. It was an extremely dangerous, but necessary task. Coming to Molokai with the intention to minister to the ill and dying, Damien found and became the truth of himself.

Portrait of Father Damien, attributed to Edward Clifford, 1868, Honolulu Academy of Arts

He dressed ulcerated lesions, built furniture, negotiated disagreements between residents, erected schools. He constructed coffins and houses, dug farm furrows and graves, created sports teams and musical bands. Father Damien created a community.

Where people had resigned themselves to extinction, he generated a desire to live.
Where hope had been abandoned, he instilled quality of life.
Where a waiting room for death had stood, he built a society.

In 1884 Father Damien recognized he had contracted leprosy.

The remaining four and half years of his life were a race to complete the projects of importance to him and the community he had dedicated his service to.

Father Damien was an evocation of true humanity.

Father Damien made his moments count.

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