19th century
Feast: May 10
He volunteered for a leper colony where no one was expected to return — and one Sunday, instead of saying ‘my fellow believers,’ he began his homily with ‘We lepers.’
Damien de Veuster was a Belgian Sacred Hearts father who arrived in Hawaii in 1864. When the Hawaiian government began forcibly exiling people with Hansen’s disease to the isolated Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai — a place surrounded by sea cliffs with no way out — Damien volunteered to go. He was thirty-three. What he found was a community abandoned to despair: no law, no sanitation, no medical care, and a mortality rate of nearly one hundred percent. Damien built houses, bandaged wounds, dug graves, and organized the settlement into something resembling a functioning village. He built a church, started farms, and piped in clean water. He also touched the patients — dressed their sores, shared their food, smoked from their pipes — at a time when the rest of the world recoiled from leprosy in terror. After twelve years, he noticed spots on his skin. ‘We lepers,’ he said from the pulpit. He had contracted the disease. He worked for another four years as his body deteriorated, refusing to leave or slow down. He died in 1889 at forty-nine, blind in one eye and covered in sores. His critics in the Protestant missionary establishment called him dirty and reckless. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a furious defense of him that silenced most of them.