Father Damien Of Molokai

Body of Hawaii’s Leper Hero to be Taken to Belgium

November 18 cables from London announced that the body of Father Damien, the Belgian priest who laboured for 16 years among Hawaiian lepers on Molokai Island will be taken to his native land, for reburial in the chapel of St.

Joseph at Louvain. The President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, has authorised the conveyance of the body to Belgium in an American warship.

The life of Father Damien (Joseph de Veuster) is one of great self-sacrifice and simple heroism. Setting himself the task of ministering physical and spiritual healing to the unfortunate lepers, he toiled faithfully for long years in an atmosphere of filth and squalor, eventu ally contracting the ghastly disease himself. He died of leprosy among the other sufferers in that little settlement on Molokai which was described as “a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell in.”

Born of.middle-class parents on January 3, 1841, at Tremeloo six miles from Louvain, he commenced his community life at the age of 18 as a drawer of water and a hewer of wood. Owing to his ignorance of Latin and Greek his superiors decided he could not take holy orders. Damien, however, begged the Fathers to permit his brother, who was

about to be ordained, to instruct him.

This was granted, and he studied with such voracious diligence and made such progress that he was allowed to prepare for the priesthood.

Took Brother’S Place

Shortly afterwards a party of mis sionaries of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary was making ready to leave for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Amongst them was Damien’s brother, then a priest, but he was seized by fever before the departure and Damien beseeched the authorities to let him take his brother’s place.

He was sent, and in 1873 arrived in Honolulu where he was ordained, and given charge of an outside district on Oahu Island. At the dedication service of a new church at Maui some months later, Damien met the Bishop of Honolulu and appealed to him to be allowed to work among the native lepers at Molokai, the state lazaret. Receiving the Bishop’s sanction, he left the same day, travelling on a cattle boat to the prison he had voluntarily chosen.

Deplorable Housing Conditions

Housing conditions on Molakai were deplorable and the moral plight of the lepers was even worse than the havoc wrought by the disease. Damien com menced work immediately and finding the settlement unsuitable built a new one.

He created a permanent water supply and made so many improvements in health conditions that the death-rate dropped perceptibly and the patients’ sufferings were eased.

His life was a busy one, full of rough hardships and privations. Often the colony ran out of provisions and Damien was the first to go short.

One day after years of toil as he sat instructing a group of lepers, a coal fell from the fire upon the palm of his hand.

He did not notice it and felt no burn — and then he knew that the fearful scourge had come upon him. After much suffering he died on April 15 1889.

Stevenson’S Famous Pamphlet

Father Damien and his work among the Molokai lepers was the subject of a vitriolic pamphlet vigorously penned by the great Robert Louis Stevenson in reply to an attack upon the Belgian priest by Dr. C. M. Hyde, a Presbyterian minister of Honolulu. On February 24, 1890* Stevenson who was recovering his broken health in New South Wales was shown

a copy of the Sydney Presbyterian, dated October 26. 1889, in which Dr. Hyde cast grave aspersions upon Damien’s moral character.

The letter, originally addressed to Rev.

H. B. Gage, and re-published in the maga zine, was as follows: — Dear Brother, —In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extrava gant newspaper laudations, as if he were a most saintly philanthropist. The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; and did not stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and lie came often to Honolulu. He had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, wh;ch were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided. He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness. Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life.

—C. M. Hyde.

After reading the paper, Stevenson leaped to his feet in furious anger, de claring that he must reply at once to smash the traducer of a dead man for whom he had conceived an ardent ad miration. Next morning he wrote the famous defence in his room at the Union Club, Bligh Street. Sydney. It was the work of only a few hours and stands now almost exactly as it was in the first hastily written draft.

Stevenson wrote graphically of his own feelings and observations when he visited the leper station. In masterly style he soundly denounced Damien’s detractor, handling words, as he expressed it, “to convey truth and arouse emotion.” With the skill of a scientist, he dissected and criticised Rev. Hyde’s letter and drew a portrait of the missionary as a noble hero labouring among the afflicted lepers.

By and by, after his letter had been published in England, Australia, and New York, Stevenson himself regretted its violence. He confessed that it was “bar barously harsh,” and that he might have defended Damien equally well without inflicting pain on others.