Father Damien

Jozef De Veuster was born on January 3, 1840, in Tremelo, a small village in Flemish Brabant, Belgium, the seventh child in a farming family. After leaving school at thirteen to help work the land, he entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary at age nineteen, taking the religious name Damien — after a fourth-century physician and martyr. When his brother, Father Pamphile, fell ill before his scheduled departure for missionary work in Hawaii, Damien volunteered to take his place. He arrived in Honolulu in January 1864 and was ordained a priest there in May 1864.

For nearly a decade Damien served parishes across the Hawaiian Islands. In 1873 he volunteered to minister to the government-run leper settlement at Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai, which had been operating since 1866. The colony was isolated by law and largely neglected; patients arrived to find no adequate housing, medical care, or spiritual support. Damien worked to change this over sixteen years. He built or repaired churches, constructed homes, coffins, and a water system, established two orphanages, organized bands and social life, and dressed the wounds of the dying himself. He is credited with transforming Kalaupapa from a place of despair into a functioning community.

In 1884, Damien publicly revealed he had contracted leprosy. He refused offers to leave for treatment and continued his work as the disease progressed. He died at Kalaupapa on April 15, 1889, at age forty-nine, and was buried near St. Philomena's Church beneath a pandanus tree where he had once slept before building a rectory.

His remains were returned to Belgium in 1936 at the request of King Leopold III. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Brussels on June 4, 1995, and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome on October 11, 2009. His right hand was later returned to Kalaupapa as a relic.