July 23, 2023 - "Saint Damien de Veuster of Molokai"

Statuary Hall is a chamber of the United States Capitol devoted to sculptures of prominent Americans.  Of the many men and women honored by the fifty States in Statuary Hall, four of them are Catholic priests.  Our saint for this week is one of those four priests represented in Statuary Hall:  Saint Damien de Veuster of Molokai.  Joseph de Veuster was born in Tremelo, Belgium in 1840 to a poor farmer and his wife.  At the age of 13, he left school to help his parents on the farm.  When he was nineteen, he entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary where he received Damien as his religious name.  His older brother, Pamphile, was also a priest in this congregation.  The Sacred Hearts Fathers agreed to provide pastoral care to the natives living on the Hawaiian Islands.  Let me provide a little background to the pastoral situation the Sacred Hears Fathers were taking on.
 
Westerners arrived in what is now the State of Hawaii late in the eighteenth century.  They brought with them a number of diseases that the native population had not been exposed to.  Within a century the ravages of the diseases had reduced the natives by 80%.  One of the most dreaded diseases was Hansen’s Disease or leprosy.  By 1870 it had reached epidemic proportions.  Since there was no known reliable treatment at the time, the authorities established a settlement on the remote island of Molokai where those suffering from Hansen’s Disease were sent.  Conditions there were unspeakable.  For those put ashore on the island of Molokai, there was no return.
 
Father Pamphile de Veuster became ill and was not able to go with the band of priests selected for the work in the Hawaiian Islands.  Damien volunteered to go in his place.  Their religious superiors accepted this offer.  In 1864 Damien was ordained a priest and began his work as a missionary in Hawaii.  In 1873 he requested to be part of a team of chaplains working at the leper colony on the island of Molokai.  A member of the team would go to Molokai for three months.  When this proved to be unworkable, Damien volunteered to remain permanently at the leper colony on Molokai. 
 
Upon his arrival he set out to instill in the residents a sense of self-worth and dignity.  He established a burial society and proper sanitation.  He constructed a church and helped build clean houses.  Gradually the island was transformed into a proud and joyful community.  From the beginning he realized that he needed to be close to his people.  After some years he recognized that he had contracted Hansen’s Disease and suffered the same isolation to which his flock had been subjected.  One of the indignities he endured from his religious congregation occurred in how they made him receive the Sacrament of Penance.  He would get into a boat and row out some distance until he would see a priest in another boat.  Damien would have to shout out his sins and then receive absolution.  Then both would row back to the places from which they had set out.
 
Fr. Damien was very pleased when the Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse arrived under the leadership of Mother Marianne Cope to help staff the colony in Kalaupapa.  The Sisters nursed him in his final months until he died of leprosy on April 15, 1889.
 
At his request he was buried at Kalaupapa, but in 1936 the Belgian government succeeded in its request for his body to be returned to his native Belgium for burial there.  Part of his body was returned to his beloved Hawaiian brothers and sisters at the time of his beatification in 1995.  He was canonized in 2009. When Hawaii became a state in 1960, it selected Damien as one of two representatives in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
 
Let me close with this comment made by Pope Saint John Paul II in the homily given on the occasion of the beatification of Father Damien: “Holiness is not perfection according to human criteria; it is not reserved for a small number of exceptional persons. It is for everyone; it is the Lord who brings us to holiness, when we are willing to collaborate in the salvation of the world for the glory of God, despite our sin and our sometimes rebellious temperament.”
 
Until next week,
Fr. John