FATHER DAMIEN
Many are the stories of brave doctors and ministers who have sacrificed
themselves in times of pestilence and plague, caring for the sick,
allowing experiments to be performed on their own bodies, and giving
their lives without fear in the hope of saving invalids and sufferers;
but no story is more thrilling than that of the Belgian priest named
Father Damien.
Father Damien's real name was Joseph de Veuster, and he was born in the
year 1840, in the little village of Tremeloo in Belgium, not far from
the city of Louvain that became famous in the World War when the
Germans sacked it, burned its university and murdered its inhabitants.
A strong religious impulse ruled the de Veuster family, and out of
three children two were destined for a religious life. As a matter of
fact all three finally entered the service of the Church--a girl named
Pauline who entered a convent and two brothers, Auguste and Joseph, who
became respectively Father Pamphile and Father Damien.
Originally the parents of these three children had decided that Auguste
was to become a priest and Joseph was to enter business and be a
merchant, but it could easily be seen the priesthood was also the life
for Joseph, who had a serious and contemplative nature even when very
young, and spent much of his time in prayer and meditation. On one
occasion, when only four years old, Joseph had been found on his knees
before the altar of the church when it was supposed that he had
wandered away from home and been lost in the woods or the fields about
the town, and when still a young boy he was fond of taking long walks
by himself in the fields and of herding sheep until he became known as
"the little shepherd."
When Joseph was eighteen his sister Pauline left home to enter the
convent, and even before that time his brother had gone to Paris to
study at the home of the Picpus Fathers. Joseph himself, in accordance
with his parents' design that he was to become a business man, went to
a town in France called Braine le Comte to learn the rudiments of a
commercial career and to study the French language. But while he had
gone there willingly, he felt the desire for a religious life more and
more strongly, until he finally told his parents that he desired to be
a priest. It was not difficult for him to obtain their consent and
Joseph went to Paris to study at the same school that his brother had
attended.
In Paris Joseph served as a novice and when this term was ended he went
to Louvain where his brother was already a priest in holy orders,
having adopted the name of Father Pamphile. Joseph himself planned to
take the name of Father Damien.
For some time Joseph lived with his brother in Louvain where he
continued his studies, but he was not yet ordained as a priest when an
event took place that changed the whole course of his life and was
destined in the end to make his name famous throughout the civilized
world.
The Picpus Fathers, like many other Catholic brothers, were great
missionaries, carrying on this service in what were then called the
Sandwich Islands, now better known as the Hawaiian Islands, under the
Government of the United States. At that time, however, the islands
formed an independent state under a native king and there was a great
deal to be done by the missionaries that went there.
Father Pamphile received orders to go to the Sandwich Islands and
engage in missionary work. He was delighted, for this work appealed to
him and he felt that he could serve his Church better in that far
country than by remaining in Louvain where he had his parish. After his
passage had been engaged, however, Father Pamphile was smitten with an
attack of typhus fever, and found himself unable to answer the call to
foreign service when the time came.
Now Joseph was even more ardent than his brother, and he burned to
answer this call himself, although he was not yet a priest. He asked
Father Pamphile, however, if it would be his pleasure for him to take
his place and engage in the missionary work that had been intended for
the elder brother; and Father Pamphile was only too glad to have Joseph
perform the task that his illness had rendered him unable to perform
himself. So Joseph wrote to his superiors, volunteering to go to the
Sandwich Islands in place of Father Pamphile, and soon a letter was
received consenting to the new arrangement. Wild with delight he told
his brother of what had taken place and at once commenced making his
preparations for the voyage.
The islands to which Father Damien was bound are of the greatest
tropical beauty, and the natives have become known all over the world
for their strange customs, their unusual music and their skill in
swimming the deep blue waters that surround the land where they live.
At that time, however, they were suffering from the ravages of the most
terrible disease, perhaps, in the entire world,--certainly the one most
feared from the times of the Bible down to the present day. This was
the disease of leprosy.
Leprosy was not a native disease in the Hawaiian Islands originally,
but had been carried there by merchants or voyagers from the Far East
where was its home, but it spread so rapidly among the natives that
before long it seemed as if the Hawaiian Islands themselves had been
the cradle of this terrible scourge. This was due, we are told, to the
hospitable habits of the islanders, who lived closely together, and to
their kindness in persisting in keeping with them those members of
their families who had already fallen its victims. At about the time
that Father Damien reached the islands, however, the Government had
taken the matter in hand, and all the lepers that could be found were
torn from their families and carried to a lonely island named Molokai.
Here they were outcasts, deserted by their friends and relatives,
living in wretchedness and desolation and, in that time, provided only
with the barest necessities of life.
After a voyage of five months, in which his ship contended with many
gales and much rough weather, Father Damien arrived in the Sandwich
Islands and was at once made a full priest and given a parish in a wild
part of the country--a parish so large that it took him days to go from
one end of it to the other. He worked hard and soon became well known
among the natives under his care, and to his fellow churchmen as a man
of great earnestness and much physical strength.
One day Father Damien happened to be at a meeting of churchmen which
was being addressed by the Bishop who said that he deeply regretted
that he could spare no priest to send to the Island of Molokai to the
unfortunate lepers, who seemed to be cast off there forsaken of God and
man alike and whose condition was wretched beyond belief. But Father
Damien at once arose and pointed out to the Bishop that a priest
_could_ be spared for such service, for one of the newcomers to the
islands could take charge of his own parish, while he himself, he said,
would go to Molokai and spend his life in caring for the lepers, whose
condition made his heart bleed whenever he thought of them.
It can be imagined that a gasp of astonishment and admiration went
through the assemblage that heard this courageous offer, for the man
who volunteered for such service was going to living death--to a place
of horror and human suffering where life appeared in its most hideous
form, and where disease wrote its imprint on the human body with such a
terrible flourish that the very sight of Father Damien's future
companions was enough to strike fear to the heart's core. But Father
Damien thought little of all this; he knew that he could do much good
among the lepers, and he made the offer in simple sincerity without a
thought of himself or of the dangers that he would encounter.
It is needless to say that it was accepted. On the spot Bishop Maigret
assigned to Father Damien the island of Molokai for a parish, and the
brave priest left on the next boat, not even having time to take with
him a change of linen or the simplest necessities of life.
It may be thought that Father Damien's heart sank when he reached the
island. A high and gloomy cliff of rock towered above the settlement of
the lepers, and he found them living in the rudest of huts, dying from
vice as well as from disease. Water was difficult to obtain and there
were none of the conveniences and few of the necessities of life.
Moreover, in that settlement, which was one that had lost all hope, the
only law that was known was the law of despair, and those that lived
there tried to forget their unhappy lot in wild orgies and revels,
drinking a fiery spirit they distilled themselves called "Ki" which was
made from the root of a plant that grew in profusion on the island,
fighting and gambling as they chose, and dying like dogs with none to
care for them, and with little hope for even a decent burial.
Here in this hell hole Father Damien was left to his own devices and
surrounded by the misshapen and hideous creatures for whose lives he
had sacrificed his own. Bishop Maigret accompanied him to Molokai, and
told the lepers he had brought them a new Father, who loved them so
much that he was willing to live with them and become one of them. Then
the good bishop went back to Honolulu, and Father Damien set himself
about the task that he had made his entire life work.
As he could not sleep in the huts of the lepers, the brave priest made
his lodging on the ground beneath a pandanus tree, and calling his new
parishioners together he preached to them with brave and comforting
words, telling them that they must not despair, but make the most of
their lives as they were, and that he would help them to build better
houses and bring to them the comforts that they needed. And at once he
busied himself getting building materials from the Government, with
which trim cottages were built, and water pipes, through which he had
fresh water piped down to the settlement from a cold spring above the
cliff. He built a chapel and a dispensary, and not content with this he
bandaged the sores of the lepers with his own hands, and washed their
wounds. Through his efforts a hospital was finally provided and a
doctor came to Molokai, and following his example sisters of mercy and
brave missionaries came there to work, but for a long time Father
Damien was alone with his charges, performing rough tasks with none to
aid him, except the aid that he obtained from the lepers themselves.
It cannot be thought that a man who performed such services could
forever escape contracting the disease, and after Father Damien had
been ten years on Molokai he found himself a victim of the scourge
against which he had so bravely and successfully contended. A visit to
the resident doctor confirmed the worst of his fears, and after that
when speaking to his congregation he used the words "we lepers,"
telling them that he himself had received the cross from which they
suffered, and henceforth was one of them in something more than name.
Although he was now an invalid, he did not fail to perform his priestly
duties until the end, but he never told his family in Belgium of the
misfortune that had befallen him. They learned it eventually from
others, and the shock of the discovery hastened his mother's death.
After fifteen years' service among the lepers Father Damien died of the
disease, leaving behind him a name for pure self-sacrifice that has not
been surpassed since the beginning of the Christian era. He had lived
to see the leper colony grow from a ribald, obscene settlement to an
orderly hospital where as much as was possible was done for the
sufferers that were compelled to remain there. And he had the
satisfaction of knowing that others would carry on efficiently the work
that he had begun.
But in spite of all his bravery and his self-sacrifice this heroic
priest was not without his traducers. A short time after his death a
certain missionary named Dr. Hyde made scurrilous charges against him
which were answered by that great writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, in a
letter that has become one of the classics of English literature, and
in which it was predicted that Father Damien would be made a saint by
the Church of Rome, as he is indeed a saint in the bravery and purity
of his life and his deeds.