What compelled a young priest to volunteer for an assignment that held the risk of contracting a then-incurable disease? Explore the life of Saint Damien and discover for yourself his great love for God and for every person he met. With the long-awaited canonization of Saint Damien, the whole world is shown an example of generous, self-giving love.

Including an introduction by Father Lane Akiona, of Damien’s order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, this booklet tells the fascinating and inspiring story of Saint Damien and leads us in a novena of prayers for his intercession.

Saint Damien is invoked as the patron of:Those suffering from Hansen’s Disease •

(leprosy)Those suffering from HIV/AIDS• Those who care for the sick• Hawai‘i•

$2.25 U.S.

Saint Damien de Veuster

Missionary of Moloka‘i

Barry Michaels

BOOKS & MEDIABoston

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Nihil Obstat: Reverend Thomas W. Buckley, S.T.D., S.S.L.Imprimatur: � Seán Cardinal O’Malley, O.F.M., Cap.

Archbishop of BostonJune 24, 2009

Cover design by Rosana Usselmann

Photo of St. Damien: Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, Province of Hawaii

Background photo: © Randolph Jay Braun / istockphoto.com

ISBN 0-8198-7128-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or trans-mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopying, recording, or by any information storageand retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub-lisher.

“P” and PAULINE are registered trademarks of the Daughters of St.Paul.

Copyright © 2009, Daughters of St. Paul

Published by Pauline Books & Media, 50 Saint Paul’s Avenue,Boston, MA 02130-3491

Printed in the U.S.A.

www.pauline.org

Pauline Books & Media is the publishing house of the Daughters ofSt. Paul, an international congregation of women religious servingthe Church with the communications media.

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Contents

The Impact of Saint Damien: Letter from Father Lane K. Akiona, SS.CC. . . . . . . . . . 1

Saint Damien’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

In the Words of Saint Damien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Novena to Saint Damien of Moloka‘i . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Prayer from the Liturgy of Saint Damien . . . . . . . . . . 25

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

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The Impact of Saint Damien

Father Damien de Veuster, SS.CC., the Apostle ofMoloka‘i, continues to be a model of service to thosein greater need. Damien was drawn to this spirit ofservice from his early years as a boy in Belgium,influenced especially by his mother. The developmentof his spiritual life at such a young age had a greateffect on his future. His living of the religious life andvows inspires us today to continue the work he start-ed. Many people in our world are not given the dig-nity and respect that is due them. Damien reminds usthat God loves them regardless.

We are called to be Damiens today. We are calledto lift up every person we meet to the dignity of God’strue love. Damien’s message of love has value for ustoday. Let us live this love in service to humanity.

Father Lane K. Akiona, SS.CC.

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Saint Damien’s Story

“I’m sorry, Father. I can’t allow it. It’s too danger-ous for us all.”

The waves of the sea lapped against the sides ofthe little wooden boat in which Father Damien stood.Though the captain was high above him on the deckof a steamer that dwarfed his little boat, and FatherDamien was helpless to do anything but accept hisrefusal to permit him to board, there was fear in thecaptain’s eyes.

Damien reminded himself of how repulsive lep-rosy used to be even to him. He knew the captain wasnot cold-hearted and was only protecting his crew.But his heart, heavy with the loneliness and depres-sion he too often seemed unable to shake, grew heav-ier still as he heard the edict.

“I understand, Captain,” Damien called up. Heand the captain were nearly shouting at each otherover the noise of the steamer engine, the wind, and

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the waves. Damien looked at the priest who stoodbeside the captain, hesitated, and took a deep breath.

“Father Modeste, would you hear my confession?”His superior had hitched a ride on the steamer boundfor the Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i with a load ofcattle, hoping for an opportunity to visit FatherDamien.

“I already told you, Father,” the captain shouteddown, his patience clearly wearing thin. “I can’t letthe good Father come down to you, either. Not unlesshe’s planning on going back to the island with you onthat little boat.” The rules at that time were thatnobody could leave once they set foot on the leper’scolony on Moloka‘i.

“I know, I know, Captain. But I still need him tohear my confession. He’s the first priest I’ve seen inseveral months and likely the last for many more. Soif you and your men could give us some privacy, Iwould be obliged.”

“You want to confess now?” Father Modeste calleddown. “Here? Like this?”

Damien held out his hands, as if inviting him tosuggest a better solution. The captain disappearedfrom Damien’s view, while the priest above shook hishead in disbelief.

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“Will you never stop surprising me, FatherDamien?” he mused as he pulled a small purple con-fessional stole from a pocket of the trousers beneathhis soutane.

Father Damien de Veuster, after all, had been sur-prising people for a long time.1

Mission to Hawai‘i

The surprises started when Joseph de Veuster wasa young man preparing for priesthood in Belgium inthe mid-nineteenth century. He had taken the nameDamien when he received the habit of the Congre-gation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.Damien’s older brother, Pamphile, was a priest of theorder, which had been founded in France half a cen-tury earlier in the wake of the French Revolution.While preparing to leave for an assignment to theorder’s mission in the island kingdom of Hawai‘i,Pamphile contracted typhus. Another priest wouldneed to go in his place.

Damien was not yet ready for ordination, but hevolunteered for the task—and not to his immediatesuperior, as would be expected, but directly in a letterto the father general of the order.

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His petition was accepted, and in late October1862, he set sail from Belgium with a handful ofSacred Hearts fathers aboard the merchant ship R. W.Wood. They traveled southwest across the AtlanticOcean, rounded Cape Horn at the tip of SouthAmerica, and then north in the Pacific Ocean, finallyreaching the Hawaiian Islands five months later.

He encountered a native people already profound-ly affected by the Western world. The first Christianmissionaries, Calvinists from New England, hadarrived nearly half a century earlier, and the SacredHearts fathers had followed a few years later.

Besides religion, the outsiders had also broughtsickness and death. As international trade broughtships from faraway places into Honolulu’s harbor, italso introduced diseases never before known on theislands. The natives, who had no immunity, were rav-aged by influenza, cholera, smallpox, syphilis, andleprosy (now properly called Hansen’s Disease). Thepopulation of the island fell from about 250,000 to50,000 in less than a century.

After arriving in Honolulu on March 19, 1864,Damien was ordained on May 21 and set about hisnew life. It was one of constant travel around the dis-trict assigned to him, composed of vast rough terrain,

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ravines, and forests. Much of the travel was by horseor mule, but some was possible only by foot. Helearned the Hawaiian language as best he could. Likethe native population, he kept sheep, pigs, and chick-ens, and tended a vegetable garden. When a mission-ary priest in a neighboring district complained ofbeing unable to handle his territory, which was largerand more difficult that Damien’s, Damien agreed toexchange posts with him.

“A Christian Hero”

In spring 1873, as Father Damien attended thededication of a new church, the local bishop raisedthe problem of Moloka‘i to the large group of SacredHearts priests who gathered there. He didn’t have toexplain the vexing issue to them; it was one withwhich everyone was familiar.

Among the many diseases troubling the nativeHawaiian population, leprosy had become a scourge.It was incurable, poorly understood, slow in its pro-gression, and terribly disfiguring in its effects. Thegovernment had established a settlement where thosesuffering from leprosy, believed to be highly conta-gious, were to be permanently quarantined.

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A small promontory called Kalaupapa at thenorthern end of the island of Moloka‘i was chosen. Itwas surrounded by the ocean on three sides and sep-arated from the rest of the island to the south by a2,000-foot cliff, making it a natural prison.

Now, several years later, with a population thatvaried between five hundred and a thousand people,Kalaupapa had become a hellish place. Its residentsfaced despair, cruelty, and almost no social structure.‘A‘ole kanawai ma keia wahi, went the local saying:“In this place there is no law.”

It was also without the care of any pastor of souls.As the bishop discussed the matter with the SacredHearts fathers gathered that afternoon, four of themvolunteered to stay at the settlement on a rotatingbasis for several weeks at a time. Father Damien wasamong them. He asked to be the first to go.

And so it was that Damien arrived at Kalaupapaon a Saturday morning, May 10, 1873. (Over a cen-tury later, May 10 would be fixed as his feast day onthe Church’s sanctoral calendar.) Though he was onlysupposed to visit periodically, Damien had a sensethat Moloka‘i was going to be his permanent home,and even that he would soon be one of the lepers, aswell as their minister. Others thought the same thing.

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Three days later, the Hawaiian newspaper Nuhouacknowledged his arrival at Kalaupapa in an editorial,saying, “We care not what this man’s theology maybe. He is surely a Christian hero.” In fact, intensepublic attention to his arrival there (and the presump-tion that he was there to stay) made it seem inadvis-able to pull him out. The idea was fine with Damien.“I am bent on devoting my life to the lepers,” hewrote to his superior.2

If his life before the move to Kalaupapa had beenhard, it now became far more difficult. He spent themajority of his time visiting the sick who populatedthe settlement. But there were many other demandson his time as well. He involved himself in layingpipes for water, rebuilding huts that had been dam-aged by storms, building a road, cleaning and band-aging sores. He built coffins, dug graves, and even, onat least one occasion, amputated a gangrenous limb.

Heartbreaking Misery

“From morning to night,” Damien wrote after ayear and a half on Moloka‘i, “I am amid heartbreak-ing physical and moral misery. Still, I try to appearalways happy, so as to raise the courage of my patients.

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I present death to them as the end of their ills, if theywill make a sincere conversion. Many see their lasthour come with resignation, and some with joy.Thus, in the course of this year, I have seen a hundredof them die with good dispositions.”3

Indeed, many at Kalaupapa responded to his pas-toral love. He had several hundred catechumens justa few months after his arrival, and people often hadto watch Sunday Mass through the windows of thechurch, so crowded did the structure become.

But Damien was not flawless, and never had been.He was seen by many as stubborn and impetuous. Hehad a way of making sure he got things done his way,especially when others, including his superiors, hadother ideas. He complained of loneliness and of feel-ing abandoned; but on the two occasions when broth-er priests were assigned to work alongside him, hebutted heads constantly with them. Letters he wrotethat were made public tended to give the impressionthat he had been abandoned by his congregation, andthat no other priest was willing to do the work he wasdoing (when, in fact, several of the Sacred Heartsfathers had volunteered to their superiors to go ifasked). In letters to his brother Pamphile, who hadfollowed a more academic path in the priesthood,

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Damien occasionally made comments that suggestedPamphile was being irresponsible to his vocation byliving a more comfortable and bookish life.

His superiors were uncomfortable with the popu-lar adulation Damien received, and were even morebothered by the large sums of money that were sent bypeople from all over the world directly to him, moneythey had almost no control over. Sometimes theylearned how it was being used by reading about this orthat project of Father Damien’s in the newspaper.

As time passed, Damien’s reputation around theworld increased and with it an awareness of the plightof leprosy victims. In 1881, he was named KnightCommander of the Royal Order of Kalakaua byHawaii’s King Kalakaua and his sister PrincessLiliuokalani.

Soon after, certainly by 1883, Father Damien con-tracted leprosy himself. He remained active in hisministry, even as sores and growths and torn skinbegan to ravage his body. He didn’t become bedrid-den until the final days of March 1889. A few weekslater, on April 15, after going to Confession andreceiving Holy Communion and the Anointing ofthe Sick, he died. It was Monday of Holy Week, andFather Damien de Veuster was 49 years old.

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