(In light of the recent memorial of Saint Marianne Cope, who also worked amongst the lepers of Hawaii, and who nursed Father Damian on his deathbed, here is a reflection by Carl Sundell on the great Belgian missionary, who gave all, and gained heaven).
Joseph de Veuster of Belgium at the age of twenty-four was ordained a missionary priest in the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Taking for his religious name “Damien,” he volunteered to go to the Hawaiian Islands to minister to the natives greatly afflicted by the introduction of diseases brought to them by foreigners and sailors. One of those dread diseases was leprosy (Hansen’s disease) for which there was no cure at that time.
Leprosy was a communicable disease that yielded disgusting scabs and hideous raw sores. Medical workers as a rule wanted nothing to do with lepers. The diseased therefore were segregated from the regular population and sent to the island of Molokai where they had to live with each other and fend for themselves. Into that milieu, against the preference but with the permission of his bishop, stepped Father Damien.
A man’s character can best be gauged by how he performs in trying situations. Father Damien’s character is easily found in available documents about his life.
When he was still a young priest with a magnificent physique, and before his assignment to Molokai, one night a native Hawaiian girl came into his hut to lie down near him. He immediately got up and went outside. The occasion so disturbed him that years later he would recount it to a friend without concealing the trauma of temptation he had overcome.
Later at Molokai he proved again his perseverance and sanctity. In desperation, he had discovered without benefit of a medical degree how to sever the rotten and putrid limbs of the lepers who were in advanced stages of the disease. Sometimes the blood of his patients would spurt upon him. He learned from this to carry with him at all times a towel and soap and water. Hearing confessions was particularly difficult. The disease often attacked the vocal chords so that the patients could only whisper. Father Damien would have to lean close enough to hear and endure simultaneously the stench of rotting flesh.
For the next ten years Father Damien gave himself body and soul to the needs of his lepers. Priests were drawn to the island to assist him, but, unable to keep pace with his workload and self-sacrifice, one after another they left him alone. Then Joseph Dutton appeared, a convert and member of the Third Order of Saint Francis. Dutton had seen service in the American civil War and proved a useful aid to Father Damien, who built him a hut near his own. A mild-mannered saint in his own right, “Brother” Dutton and Father Damien together worked with the lepers from before dawn to nearly midnight. Then one day, after reading the Gospel, Father Damien began his homily by addressing the congregation of lepers in words that revealed what they dreaded to hear: instead of the typical “My brethren,” he said, “We lepers ….” Damien had become one of them.
Within three months his physical health deteriorated. One foot became numb and one ear was disfigured; yet he continued to wash and bandage his patients, and also to make their coffins and dig their graves. There was, however, a certain happy resignation to what had happened. Damien now became less serious minded and more playful, going so far as to carve wooden toys for the leper children. When the bishop learned of his condition, he ordered Damien to a Honolulu hospital where he could be treated in order to slow down the fatal course of the disease. Damien held off obeying this command as long as possible and threw himself more fully than ever into his work. Finally he arrived at the hospital, too late; his nose was swollen, his ears were misshaped, and his complexion had turned crimson. His stay was short and he returned to Molokai to end his great sacrifice in the forty-ninth year of his life. Hours before his death the tubercles that had covered his face disappeared. When he died, his fame having spread through all the continents, the world mourned … all, it seemed, but one man…
Rev. Charles McEwen Hyde, a Congregational minister in Hawaii, wrote a letter to a friend in which he described Father Damien as a “coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted,” and “not a pure man in his relations with women.” Moreover, according to Hyde, he had done no more for the lepers than the Protestant clergy had done. Unfortunately for Mr. Hyde, the letter came into the hands of the famous English writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who had just spent several weeks investigating conditions at Molokai, having arrived there shortly after Father Damien’s death. His own motives, Stevenson frankly confessed, were not the purest, having made a point of seeking reports about Father Damien mostly from those who would have the least interest in singing his praises. Yet Stevenson too, before departing the island, like Father Damien had fallen into the habit of playing games with, and presenting gifts to, the leper children of Molokai.
Stevenson subsequently fired off a letter to Reverend Hyde in which he hoped to settle accounts on behalf of Father Damien. The document, as this brief excerpt shows, is a masterpiece of vitriol as only Stevenson’s great style could produce.
I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy … 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 honor – the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and lost forever. One thing remained to you in your defeat – some rags of honor; and these you have made haste to cast away.
It was one of those startling ironies of history that the Reverend Hyde and Father Damien were paired together by Robert Louis Stevenson, who four years earlier had penned that other dual psychological drama of the healer’s light and his alter-ego’s shadow … Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.