By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
For our 50th birthday gifts, my wife Vicki and I each chose a dream destination trip. For my golden birth anniversary we flew over the Atlantic and landed in Ireland in 2011. In 2015, Vicki’s half-century birthday took us to the Hawaiian Islands. Our Pacific adventure travel companions included family, close friends, and a remarkable Catholic saint who never made it to age 50.
His name is Father Damien, and since childhood he has intrigued me. My friends the Trappist monks from the old Huntsville monastery introduced me to him as the holy man who sacrificed his life caring for victims of Hansen’s disease (leprosy). One of the monks—Brother Boniface—regularly gave us money to pass on to the Kalaupapa leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, where Father Damien lived and worked.
Damien’s story of compassion and devotion even unto death always fascinated and inspired me. As a young boy, I wrote to our contact in Molokai, the person to whom we sent the Utah monastery’s donations. I offered to be a pen pal with any of the lepers who might want outside contact. The return letter thanked me for the kind offer, but politely declined, explaining that although the disease was controlled, it still was contagious.
Father Damien was born as Jozef De Veuster in Belgium in 1840. As a young man, he followed his older brother’s footsteps and joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a missionary religious institute. When his brother Auguste (known as Father Pamphile) could not travel on missionary work to Hawaii because of illness, Damien took his place. In 1864, he arrived by steamship at Honolulu Harbor in Oahu. He was ordained a priest in Hawaii three months later.
When the local Catholic bishop announced that residents of the Kalaupapa colony—isolated by government order on uninhabited Molokai to stop the spread of the disease—needed a Catholic priest to assist them, Father Damien volunteered. Arriving there in 1873, he spoke to the assembled lepers as “one who will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you; to live and die with you.”
For eleven years, he built needed infrastructure, cared for the colonists, helped them organize themselves, buried their dead, and addressed their spiritual needs. In December 1884, Father Damien accidentally put his foot into scalding hot bath water. His skin blistered but he felt nothing. He realized then that he had leprosy too. He continued his work despite the infection, but eventually died of the disease five years later in 1889 at age 49.
Pope Benedict XVI canonized him a saint on October 11, 2009. Father Damien is the patron saint of Hawaii and his death day is a statewide holiday. In 1969, along with King Kamehameha I, the state of Hawaii honored him with a statue in the United States Capitol building rotunda.
While in Hawaii in 2015, we did the usual wonderful things—including beach time and snorkeling—and saw the usual lovely unique mountain and ocean sights. Yet, for me Father Damien’s presence always was palpable, as if his spirit still inhabited the place.
When we arrived at our condo in Kaanapali, on Maui’s western shore, I looked out from our balcony and there across the ocean was Molokai, quiet, looming, alone, and almost forbidding. During dinner one night at the Maui Brewing Company, I sipped a drink called “Saint Damien,” a strong dark and delicious Belgian ale. In Lahaina, we attended Sunday Mass at a lovely 1846 church named Maria Lanakila, which means Our Lady of Victory. As I left, I found a lovely mosaic of Damien.
There were similar Damien sightings after we left Maui and arrived in Oahu. From Oahu’s eastern coast, I glimpsed Molokai again, although not Kalaupapa, which sits sheltered by some of the highest sea cliffs in the world on the north central shore of the largely uninhabited island. On a tour of downtown Honolulu, we saw the famous statue of Damien by sculptor Marisol Escobar, gracing the front of the Hawaii State Capitol building. This Damien stands just steps away from another famous Honolulu statue, the gilded bronze of King Kamehameha I in front of Aliʻiolani Hale, now home to the Hawaiian Supreme Court. Nearby is the church where Father Damien was ordained, the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace.
For Father’s Day, we attended Sunday Mass at the church of Saint Augustine by the Sea, a beautiful A-frame structure built in 1960 on the edge of the iconic Waikiki strip and under the watchful eye of Diamond Head. I’ll never forget the fragrant yellow Father’s Day lei my family got me, but equally beautiful were Saint Augustine’s recollections of another father, Hawaii’s patron saint.
The front of Saint Augustine’s featured a beautiful painting of a young Damien arriving by boat in Molokai. We missed the church’s Damien museum, which had closed but now is planning to reopen in its own building. The museum is dedicated both to Damien and to Saint Marianne Cope of Molokai, a German-born religious sister who cared for Damien in his final years and continued and expanded health care services in the colony after the priest died. It will display several Damien relics and related historical artifacts—such as the saint’s chalice, walking sticks, and carpentry tools—and tell the stories of many victims of Hansen’s disease.
Damien was not without his contemporary critics. Robert Louis Stevenson, the renowned author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, provided an interesting response to the naysayers in 1890. After spending eight days in Molokai , Stevenson wrote, “And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged, bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.”
Although it is relatively easier to get there today than in Stevenson’s time 130 years ago, in 2015 we did not make it to Father Damien’s Kalaupapa. I think, however, we may have been invited to visit there on our next trip. At the Honolulu International Airport, just as we boarded our plane home, Hawaii graced us with a lovely, beckoning full rainbow. It was to the east, arching high over Diamond Head, and spanning the neighboring island of Molokai.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in the Spring of 2021.
