Saint Damien de Veuster

Jozef de Veuster was born in Tremelo, Belgium, on January 3, 1840, the son of Flemish farmers. He entered the novitiate of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts in Leuven, taking the name Damien, and he took the place of his brother, who was meant for the missions and couldn’t go. He landed in Honolulu on March 19, 1864, and was ordained a priest two months later. For nine years he worked as a missionary in the Hawaiian Islands. Then, in 1873, he asked to go to Molokai. The Hawaiian government deported people with leprosy to Molokai: they were put ashore on a peninsula closed off by a wall of cliffs and left there, with no doctors, no law, no way back. Damien went there to stay. He built houses, dug graves, dressed sores, worked as carpenter and gravedigger, and demanded from the government what the sick were owed. Above all, he ate with them and touched them, in a place where no one did. In 1884 he noticed he could no longer feel boiling water on his feet: he had caught leprosy too. He kept going for five more years, and on Sundays he began his sermons by saying “we lepers.” He died on Molokai on April 15, 1889, at forty-nine. Benedict XVI proclaimed him a saint on October 11, 2009. In Hawaii he is a civic hero even before he is a saint, and a statue of him stands in the U.S. Capitol in Washington. If your name is Damien, today is your name day — though many wait for September twenty-sixth.