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Profile: Saint Damien de Veuster

Great men of faith risk life and limb to serve and minister to others, and for this they deserve to be honored and remembered. Damien de Veuster (1840–1889) was a missionary who moved to Hawaii to aid a leper colony. As a result, he contracted leprosy and lost his life. For many years Damien was unjustly ridiculed by other ministers. One unlikely man came to his defense and today Damien is remembered as Saint Damien de Veuster.

A curious figure inhabits the halls of the U.S. Capitol—a square statue, with glasses that stick out and a cassock covering the beaten body. This man is Saint Damien de Veuster, the only saint to be honored with a place in the Capitol. Born in Flanders, Belgium, when Damien turned twenty-three, he followed Christ’s call to evangelize to the “furthermost parts of the earth,” and moved to Hawaii. When Hawaii took the drastic measure of sequestering the growing number of lepers on the far end of the island of Molokai—divided from the rest of civilization by a mountain—Damien volunteered to serve them.

Damien arrived at the settlement in 1873. He knew he would encounter squalor, lawlessness, and a horrifying disease, and was most likely signing his death sentence. But he stood strong, writing his brother to say, “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.”

Damien implemented basic law and order. Under his direction, shacks received a coat of paint, farms were organized, and a school was built. Then in 1884, Damien contracted leprosy himself. He worked diligently to continue his reforms, enlarge orphanages, and serve. When he died five years later, Damien was forty-nine.

“Were it not for the constant presence of our divine Master in our humble chapel,” said Damien, “I would not have found it possible to persevere in sharing the lot of the lepers in Molokai . . . Here I am a priest, dear parents, here I am a missionary in a corrupt, heretical, idolatrous country. How great my obligations are! Ah! do not forget this poor priest running night and day over the volcanoes night and day in search of strayed sheep. Pray night and day for me, I beg You.”

After his death the Catholic Church moved to honor this brave man, but other ministers leveled scurrilous accusations, one Presbyterian minister, C. M. Hyde, delivered a particularly vicious condemnation.

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In response, none other than the famed author Robert Louis Stevenson stood up to defend Damien’s reputation and memory, helping to preserve the possibility of sainthood for the quiet priest. He wrote,

We are not all expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his comforts better, and none will cast a stone at him for that . . . But, sir, when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succors the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat—some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.

In 1995, Damien was beatified, and in 2009, he finally received sainthood.

“The servant of the Word consequently became a suffering servant, a leper with the lepers, for the last four years of his life,” said Pope Benedict XVI. “In order to follow Christ, Fr Damien not only left his homeland but also risked his health”: therefore as the word of Jesus proclaimed to us in today’s Gospel says he received eternal life.”