Damien the Leper, Damien of Christ
Advice to Be Read on Shipboard. To find the good in a thing at once is a sign of good taste.…They have the luckier taste who amongst a thousand defects seize upon a single beauty that they may have hit upon by chance.–Given by the Superior General of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary to the missionaries departing for Hawaii in 1863
Having been raised when the news was still delivered with the evening paper, the reading of which was a somber ritual reserved for fathers and barred to sons, my boyhood vision did not encompass the doings of the larger world. There were great advantages to this limited perspective, to seeing only those things that were close at hand, but they must be set against certain needless fears to which a narrower knowledge made me vulnerable. I did not know, in 1957, that there was little likelihood of contracting leprosy in South Philadelphia. Such ignorance became a source of secret anxiety in my young life, as I watched carefully the slow healing of small wounds and worried about any lack of feeling I seemed to experience in my extremities. This misplaced concern was the result of stories told my third-grade class by Sister Josephita, an ardent admirer of Father Damien of Molokai.
I remember sitting at my desk while the late September sun poured through the large windows of the classroom and Sister Josephita recounted for us the horrors of a leper colony on an island half a world away and a century removed in time, but so intense was her devotion to Damien and so vivid her narrative that I thought of the scenes she described as unfolding in the present. I would look out the window and imagine farther off the peaks of Molokai reaching into the sky, high above the huddled settlement where Father Damien was washing and bandaging the open sores of his flock. Damien was a hero to me: a man whose courage was to be envied and emulated. He was also a figure of dread: one whose example I might be called to follow. Doubts about my own bravery ran deep, and I wondered darkly whether I should fail when my moment of trial arrived.
And, as I say, I wondered about the health of my own flesh, which I then realized was rather dear to me, perhaps more so than it should have been. Lepers featured prominently in many of the stories I heard as a young boy. They appeared frequently in the Gospels and in the lives of the saints. Their affliction struck me as among the real and terrible possibilities of life, and the fear that I might be marked for such a fate left me torn between resignation and revulsion. Indeed, sometimes I was seized by a kind of panic at the idea of becoming a leper. All this may seem rather silly now, a bit of juvenile melodrama that a more sensible nature would have dismissed, but I cannot deny that I sometimes tossed on my bed at night, thinking of Molokai, of being surrounded by creatures with fingerless hands and crumbling lips and holes where noses had been. I imagined them staring out at me from the dark corners of my room. I asked God for strength, and for deliverance from the horrors I envisioned, then felt ashamed of my cowardice as I thought of Damien.
More than a half-century has elapsed since I lived in fear of leprosy, and, at the time of this writing, Father Damien is about to be raised to the honors of the altar. Were a child today to find himself wondering about his susceptibility to the disease, he would likely “google” it and, within minutes, have his fears allayed by the facts on the screen: the nature of the bacterium leprae; the numbers and locations of those afflicted; the contagion, progression and treatment of the disease; its history through the centuries and in various societies. I had no such resources available to me, and perhaps it is good that I was left to wonder about my fate and to exercise my young mind in trying to understand the heart of a man such as Damien. I sometimes lament the present-day loss of such innocence as I possessed and think of the lines from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from the Rock:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
If anything is generally known about Damien these days, it is likely to have been discovered through the Internet, that dubious yet largely unquestioned satisfier of universal curiosity. There are several books, including Damien the Leper by John Farrow, my personal favorite. There is also a documentary film and a star-studded Hollywood movie. Both have some merit, but neither is entirely accurate. The 2003 documentary, narrated by Robin Williams, even quotes a tour guide at Molokai proclaiming that Damien cared only about people and was not interested in “pushing religion.” The assumption is that caring about people and pushing religion are somehow antithetical, and that a missionary priest who passed his seminary days praying to St. Francis Xavier had little interest in converting souls to Christ. The preferred popular portrait of Damien is that of a humanist. He must be fitted into the category of the social-worker saint whose natural virtues are separable from his religious faith. The late Pope John Paul II, in beatifying Damien in 1995, fell in with the fashion and declared him to be “a servant of humanity.” The term would have puzzled Damien, who understood himself to be a servant of God.
But it is never easy to describe a saint. We can only discern the evidence of an inward life that must remain largely hidden, for God alone can know the heart of one of His creatures. Those who attempt to tell the stories of saints must rely on whatever dramatic detail is offered by external events. The story of Father Damien is rich in drama, but such richness can be either a source of edification or misunderstanding, depending upon the perspective of the storyteller.
The details of his early life are few and simple. Born in 1840, Damien grew up amid a large family on a farm in the Flemish village of Tremeloo (in modern-day Belgium), but his father had ambitions for young Joseph de Veuster and sent him to school to learn French so that he might pursue a career in commerce. Joseph, however, had a vocation. Although as a boy he was wont to get into a bit of mischief, his high spirits were grounded in a serious nature. When he was moved, he was moved deeply, and nothing could dissuade him from a course of action he had resolved to follow. After attending a Redemptorist retreat, Joseph decided he was called to the religious life. His father eventually became resigned to his joining his brother Pamphile as a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. He was first marked out to be a lay brother, but he learned enough Latin from Pamphile to become a candidate for the priesthood. Like everything else in his life, however, his path to the priesthood was to be an unusual one. Pamphile had been ordained and was among a group of young priests about to disembark for the missions in the Hawaiian Islands, but he became ill–too ill to travel. Joseph, who had taken the religious name Damien, after a fourth-century physician and martyr, violated protocol and wrote directly to the superior of the order in Paris, begging permission to take his brother’s place. It was surprisingly granted.
Not yet ordained, Damien found himself aboard a ship in Bremerhaven about to begin a five-month passage under sail to the South Pacific. He loved life aboard ship and was a good sailor, even climbing into the rigging to help set canvas. If anything ever frightened him, he never gave evidence of it; nor did he ever appear fatigued. Gifted with immense courage and strength, both physically and morally, Damien was about to put his talents to use climbing mountains, crossing volcanoes, tramping through forests, building churches and making converts to Christ and his Church. He was ordained at the cathedral in Honolulu two months after he arrived, in May 1864, and began his missionary work on the large island of Hawaii. He labored with great success for almost a decade when, in 1873, Bishop Maigret addressed the priests of his diocese and made what was for him a difficult request.
The government of Hawaii, then a monarchy largely controlled by American administrators, had been combating a virulent outbreak of leprosy and decided to establish an isolation colony on the island of Molokai. Lepers, by law, were required to report their condition to local authorities. They would then be transported to Honolulu and confined until ships took them to Molokai. Once there, they were never permitted to leave the colony. For some years, the Church had staffed a small chapel for the Catholic lepers with a rotation of volunteers: each priest would serve for a short period, then be replaced. But the Board of Health decided on a policy of complete isolation: no one who entered the leper colony would be allowed to leave it. The bishop was in consequence compelled either to abandon the Catholic souls afflicted with the disease or to ask one of his priests to consign himself to Molokai for the rest of his life and, as seemed certain, to the fate of eventually becoming a leper.
Bishop Maigret, a hardy soul with a tender heart, could not bring himself to order anyone to accept such an assignment. As it turned out, there was no need. Immediately after explaining the situation to a gathering of his priests, four volunteers stepped forward, including Damien.
The other three priests were newly arrived. Damien argued convincingly that his experience made him the best qualified among the volunteers. Reluctantly, the bishop agreed, thus condemning this healthy, young man to spend the remainder of his days looking upon scenes that the rest of the world regarded with the utmost terror and revulsion. Damien discovered that a leper ship was leaving that very night and proposed to board it. Maigret could not bear to let him make the journey alone and accompanied Damien to the island, where he stood on the beach, announced to the gathered lepers that he had brought them a spiritual father to care for them, then blessed the flock, stammered a few parting words to Damien and returned to the ship, leaving his priest behind in a circle of hell that Dante could not have imagined.
There was no place for Damien to live, so he slept outside beneath a tree near the dilapidated church of St. Philomena, which he immediately began to clean and repair. He spent his first days surveying the scenes on the peninsula of Kalaupapa, a windswept strip of land cut off from the rest of the island by sheer cliffs rising 3,000 feet above the settlement. The lepers lived in conditions that would have been hideous for any human being, but they suffered the added torments of their disease and the emotional desolation of family separation: mothers had been torn away from their children, and children from their mothers; husbands and wives were separated, never to see each other again. The lepers were considered as already dead, removed from the land of the living and left to rot in oblivion. Most lived in filthy, lean-to shelters with no bedding. Food was scarce and medicine non-existent. Their sores were unbandaged. Some became so morally abandoned that it was said no law of God or man existed at Molokai. There were no police. Drunkenness and prostitution were common.
There was a belief prevalent among the largely Protestant establishment in Honolulu that leprosy represented the fourth stage of syphilis, so there was little sympathy for its sufferers, who were seen as pagans being justly punished for their immorality. The truth was otherwise, and leprosy, along with syphilis, was introduced to the islands by the white man. The Protestants also bore a great resentment toward the Catholic missionaries. Bishop Maigret, as a young priest, had for a time been expelled from the islands. The Protestants, mostly from America, controlled the government, including the Board of Health. The official plan, absurd as it was, had envisioned Molokai as a self-sustaining agricultural community, and the lepers were blamed for failing to implement the plan. Of course, most of them had only four or five years to live; some less. As the disease progressed, they became lame and blind and weak–hardly fit to follow behind the plow, if there had been a plow.
Damien did what he could with whatever he had, and he became a relentless advocate for the lepers, forever petitioning the Board of Health and church officials in Honolulu for help. The lepers were eventually granted a $6 annual allowance. This enabled Damien to obtain for them inexpensive clothing and other necessities. Meanwhile, he spent the greater part of his days baptizing, burying and bandaging. He cut strips of cloth to wrap wounds, but the shortage of bandages required him to wash the cloths again and again for reuse. He refused to abide by the admonitions he had been given against touching the lepers or sharing their food. He had no fear of contracting the disease and would not allow his parishioners to see him shrink from them. As he wrote to his brother Pamphile in Paris, he had already sat under the funeral pall when he took the vows of his order, so he had died in Christ a long time ago. In the evenings, he set aside time to build coffins, as never a day passed without a burial, sometimes several.
Damien never complained about his own lot, only that of his parishioners and his catechumens in spe, i.e. all the lepers he hoped to convert. He became an increasing nuisance to the officials who preferred to forget about Molokai. Damien thus earned a reputation as a difficult and obstinate man. He would not be cowled or silenced when it came to his lepers. The colony had no water supply, so Damien bothered officials in Honolulu until they sent a shipment of pipes to Molokai that he and his lepers connected to a spring on the mountainside. A storm blew away the filthy shelters under which the lepers had huddled, so Damien petitioned and obtained lumber with which he was able to construct decent huts. He managed to get hold of musical instruments, recruit and train choirs and form burial societies. He established a makeshift orphanage. And always, always, he taught the faith, and he fought a ceaseless battle against those who tried to take his parishioners away from him.
At one point, a shaman of sorts who had acquired a knowledge of voodoo in the West Indies began a campaign to rid Molokai of Damien’s influence. Fewer people were appearing at Mass and cold looks were replacing smiles in certain quarters as Damien made his rounds. At night, he would lie awake and listen to the drums beating for the pagan ritual in the hills, until one night he decided to act, to take the fight to the enemy. For a long time, he made his way through the dark, stumbling amid the thick foliage as he climbed higher toward the sound of the drums. At last, he arrived at the mouth of a cave whose interior was lighted by torches. There, the followers of the voodoo priest squatted. Damien spied his nemesis at the head of the assembly, looking down on a bowl of blood that had just been drained from the body of a dog. The shaman held in his hand a doll dressed in black with a white face and a rosary wrapped around its middle. As Damien advanced toward the voodoo priest, some of the men rose to attack him, but in the confusion, the bowl of blood was spilled and the men jumped back in alarm. Damien then grabbed the doll out of the hands of the shaman, ripped it to pieces, then threw it on the ground and stomped on its head. So much for the power of voodoo. No one was to snatch out of Damien’s hands what God had given him.
Although Damien never sought any publicity, it came to him unbidden. His brother Pamphile published one of his letters, and he quickly became famous throughout Europe. His reputation among some of the good people in Honolulu also began to grow. Eventually, the princess-regent, Liluokalani, against the advice of her entourage, decided to visit Molokai. The planned hourlong stay became a daylong visit, as the princess became overwhelmed by the suffering she saw and reluctant to leave her people. As she was at last rowed back to her ship, she wept uncontrollably. The princess later awarded Damien the Order of Kalakaua, the highest honor her government could bestow. The honor did not immediately bring Damien the aid he sought for his lepers, but it did help to make their plight known, as the newspapers took note of the event and reports of Father Damien’s work gained international attention. What he most wanted was a companion in his labors and nuns to help care for the dying and the orphans. He eventually, but rather late in his short life, obtained both.
The companion came from an unexpected quarter. Ira Barnes Dutton had been a calvary officer for the Union Army in the War Between the States. He had also wedded unwisely and his wife, after several infidelities committed in the first year of their marriage, abandoned him for another man. He later divorced her. Little is known about his conversion to the Catholic Faith, which occurred in mid-life, but it caused him to forsake a lucrative government post and to devote himself to a life of penance. He read about Father Damien and decided that Molokai was where he belonged.
He was known as Brother Joseph, although Dutton never took any religious vows. He and Damien got on well from the start, and Dutton brought his military training to bear on Damien’s affairs. He had a talent for organization and a dedication to the work that approached Damien’s own. It was sometimes said of Damien that he was headstrong and intractable; incapable of working with others. Dutton gave that the lie. Damien only appeared difficult to those who did not share his commitment to the physical and spiritual welfare of his lepers. Eventually, some priest helpers also came to the island and, what Damien had longed for most, nuns. But Blessed Mother Marianne Cope and her Franciscan sisters arrived near the end of Damien’s life, a sort of parting gift to show that his prayers had not been in vain.
Perhaps the most important day for his parishioners occurred on a Sunday in June 1885. Damien stepped to the altar rail, as usual, to deliver his sermon, but then, instead of using his customary salutation, “My Brethren,” he began by saying, “We lepers.” Damien had finally become one with his people.
The years of his decline were, perhaps, the busiest of his life, as donations and helpers began to arrive. He finally had beds, a hospital, an orphanage, sisters to care for his people, the good Brother Joseph to carry on his work and more priests from the mainland to administer the sacraments. He worked until the end; until he could no longer walk and had difficulty seeing through one eye. He died the Monday of Holy Week, April 15, 1889.
In his last years, he had been visited by Edward Clifford, an English Protestant artist who was greatly moved by Damien’s work and who wrote what became a popular book about the priest of Molokai. In a way, Damien became more famous in death than he ever was in life, thanks in part to Robert Louis Stevenson, another Protestant. Stevenson had intended to visit Damien, but arrived a month too late. Still, he was able to spend some time with Mother Marianne and Brother Joseph and the people of Molokai. He was amazed at what Father Damien had accomplished and wrote a beautiful poem of tribute to Mother Marianne and her sisters. Shortly after Stevenson’s visit, there was published in a Protestant ecclesiastical journal a letter by the Rev. C.M. Hyde, of Honolulu, to a fellow minister in Australia who had enquired about the work of Father Damien. Hyde dismissed Damien as “a coarse, dirty man” who had been given credit for care that had been provided the lepers by the Board of Health and the Protestant authorities. He further said that Damien’s leprosy was his own fault, the result of his “vices,” stating that Damien had not been “a pure man in his relations with women.” Hyde thus reinforced the false notion that leprosy was a stage of syphilis and viciously defamed a holy and chaste man. His slanders did not go unanswered.
There are some unenviable people who earn renown in this world by being chastised by a great writer. No one would remember Colly Cibber if he had not annoyed Alexander Pope. No one would remember Mr. Hyde if he had not angered Robert Louis Stevenson. In an open letter that was published in several newspapers throughout the world, Stevenson defended Father Damien and exposed Hyde as a malicious liar. Stevenson pointed out that although the Protestant missionaries had failed to evangelize the Hawaiians, they had succeeded in making themselves rich; that the proud houses of the Protestant clergy, including Hyde’s own mansion where Stevenson had once been a guest, were a cause of mockery among the poor in Honolulu. He concluded his open letter by telling Hyde that Damien was “my father…and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you the grace to see it.”
Much has been learned about leprosy since Damien’s time. Millions are still afflicted, most in India and Southeast Asia, but effective treatment in now possible. Lepers are no longer segregated by law, nor do they bear the moral stigma from earlier misunderstandings about the cause of the disease. But to think of Damien only in relation to leprosy would be to miss the import of his life, as do those who regard him as a social worker.
Now and then, in a manner that the world is compelled to notice, God gives us someone who shows us what it means to be a disciple of Christ, who reminds us of the essence of our religion by living it in as perfect a way as an imperfect creature can. Now and then, there appears among us a St. Francis of Assisi or a Father Damien to wake us from our sleepwalking in the Faith and to show us the face of Christ on earth. And, at the risk of presumption, I would say that to Father Damien the sores of his lepers were as nothing compared to the hideousness of sin he saw among the so-called healthy people of his day. What would he think of the open, running spiritual sores of our own time, and even in our own Church?
There is a cure for leprosy, but where is the cure for modernity? It is there, in Damien, as in Christ. It is love, and love is sacrifice, not social work. St. Damien, pray for us.
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