CHRIST’S APOSTLE OF THE
LEPERS - THE FATEFUL WORDS...
He read the letter,
over and over. "You may stay as long as your devotion
dictates...." The words exploded against his mind and shook his
heart. Again, and once again, he read them. They were the most welcome
words he had ever received.
He stood and listened
to the sounds about him. Soft, cool breezes gently swept across his
island. The palm trees along the shore bowed before the refreshing
winds and clapped their great fronds in joy. Bright morning sunlight
played over the trees, turning the leaves, now silver, blue. The
Pacific waves rolled tranquilly against the rocky shores. The green
and white waters rose and fell; the ocean’s motion never stopped,
day or night. The restless power locked in the Pacific’s waves
mirrored the surging energies locked within his own heart.
He was a priest—a
simple man. His parents were Belgian farmers. Nature had prepared his
square, sturdy, and well-developed body to till the soil. God had
summoned him to labor in a different field—to cultivate a more
violent harvest. The words he now read hammered home this summons.
The letter, from his
superiors, gave the priest, Father Damien De Veuster, permission to
stay where he was and where he, in the springtime of 1873, longed with
all his heart to be on Molokai, one of the Hawaiian Islands. Father De
Veuster, thirty-three, had already served nine years in the Hawaiian
missions. He was a member of the Fathers of the Sacred Hearts, who had
pioneered Catholicism in the islands. These religious had faced and
overcome enormous problems since their arrival in 1827. Now they faced
a new and frightful challenge, a leprosy epidemic. To halt the spread
of the dread disease, the Hawaiian government had isolated several
hundred lepers at Kalaupapa, on the island of Molokai. Catholic lepers
there begged for a priest. Many missioners, despite danger of
contagion, had offered to go. The Bishop, Louis Maigret, and Father
Modeste, the religious superior of the Sacred Hearts Fathers, had
selected Damien to begin the mission. Both were reluctant to put such
a crushing burden permanently on this young priest’s square and
sturdy shoulders. The Bishop and Father Modeste knew the bitter work
that had to be done; they hesitated to demand that this one man do so
much of it.
Thirteen years
before, while a student for the priesthood in France, Damien had
symbolically faced and accepted death. At the public profession of his
final vows, as was the religious custom of the times, his superiors
covered him with a funeral pall. He had truly believed then that only
by accepting death would he discover life. Now, thirteen years later,
he was putting his dedication to the test. He sought to serve the most
pitiful of all men, the lepers of Molokai. By so doing, in the words
of Robert Louis Stevenson, "he shut to, with his own hands, the
doors of his own sepulchre."
The restless sea
washes against Molokai’s massive palisades. Natives call the island
"the land of great cliffs." A century ago, Hawaiian blood
froze at the very name of Molokai. Lepers waded through this surf to
await death.
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THE NEW PASTOR
Bishop Maigret
accompanied Damien to Molokai. The Bishop proudly presented the new
pastor to the Catholic lepers. The joy of their welcome and Damien’s
excitement upon finally arriving at Molokai, dimmed the fact that he
carried with him little more than his Breviary. Sacred Hearts
religious previously had built a tiny chapel on Molokai, and had
dedicated it to St. Philomena. For his first rectory, Damien used the
shelter of a pandanus tree, beside the little church. The pandanus
offered hospitality to all passing creatures, centipedes, scorpions,
ants, roaches and, finally, fleas. Cats, dogs and sheep found shelter
under the tree’s kind branches. Damien settled in comfortably. A
large rock on the side of the tree served as his dinner table. During
these first weeks the new missionary took normal precautions to avoid
contagion.
With the lepers’
help, Damien added the rear wing to Molokai’s chapel. He also built
the rectory. The priest was a skillful carpenter. No construction
project daunted him.
But if Damien
protected his body, there was nothing he could do to protect his eyes
or ears or sense of smell from the shock of contact with the leper.
Here at Kalawao, the priest had opened a door to hell. Victims of the
disease were all about him, their bodies in ruins, their faces ravaged
and smashed by the voracious bacillus of leprosy. The constant
coughing of the sick was the colony’s most familiar sound. Gathering
up his enormous resources of courage, Damien began to approach the
lepers one by one. Their breath was fetid; their bodies, already in a
state of corruption, exuded a most foul odor. One of his first visits
was to a young girl. He had found that worms had eaten her whole side.
"Many a
time," he wrote as he recalled these first days, "in
fulfilling my priestly duties at the lepers’ homes, I have been
obliged, not only to close my nostrils, but to remain outside to
breathe fresh air. To counteract the bad smell, I got myself
accustomed to the use of tobacco. The smell of the pipe preserved me
somewhat from carrying in my clothes the obnoxious odor of our
lepers."
Molokai was a colony
of shame, peopled by lost souls and smashed bodies. Medical care was
minimal. Even if decent care were provided, Hawaiians distrusted the
white man’s medicine, preferring their own witch doctors, or kahuna.
White doctors sporadically appeared at government expense. These
physicians lived in terror of contagion. One doctor examined lepers’
wounds by lifting their bandages with his cane. Another left medicine
on a table where lepers could collect it without touching him.
Life was grotesque on
Molokai. Ambrose Hutchinson, a veteran of half a century in the
colony, describes an incident in the settlement’s early days.
"A man, his face partly covered below the eyes, with a white rag
or handkerchief tied behind his head, came out from the house that
stood near the road. He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with a
bundle, which, at first, I mistook for soiled rags. He wheeled it
across the yard to a small windowless shack.... The man then half
turned over the wheelbarrow and shook it. The bundle (instead of rags
it was a human being) rolled out on the floor with an agonizing groan.
The fellow turned the wheelbarrow around and wheeled it away, leaving
the sick man lying there helpless. After a while the dying man raised
and pushed himself in the doorway; with his body and his legs
stretched out, he lay there face down."
Molokai was a chamber
of horrors. But the Hawaiian government (which at this time was
independent of the United States and headed by native royalty) had not
planned it that way.
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DAMIEN’S COLONY OF DEATH
At the outset of his
mission Damien aimed to restore in each leper a sense of personal
worth and dignity. To show his poor battered flock the value of their
lives, he had to demonstrate to them the value of their deaths. And so
he turned his attention first to the cemetery area beside his little
chapel. He fenced it around to protect the graves from the pigs, dogs,
and other scavengers. He constructed coffins and dug graves. He
organized the lepers into the Christian Burial Association to provide
decent burial for each deceased. The organization arranged for the
requiem Mass, the proper funeral ceremonies, and sponsored a musical
group that played during the funeral procession.
Damien continued to
minister to the sick, bringing the Sacraments of confession and Holy
Communion and anointing bedridden lepers. He washed their bodies,
bandaged their wounds and tidied their rooms and beds. He did all he
could to make them as comfortable as possible.
He encouraged lepers
to help him in all his activities. With their assistance he built
everything from coffins to cottages. He constructed the rectory, built
a home for the lepers’ children. When the colony expanded along the
peninsula to Kalaupapa, he hustled the lepers into construction of a
good road between Kalawao and Kalaupapa. Under his direction, lepers
blasted rocks at the Kalaupapa shoreline and opened a decent docking
facility. Damien taught his people to farm, to raise animals, to play
musical instruments, to sing. He watched with pride as the leper bands
he organized marched up and down playing the music Hawaiians love so
well. No self-pity in this colony. Damien’s cheerful disposition and
desire to serve touched the lepers’ hearts without patronizing or
bullying them. Little by little their accomplishments restored the
sense of dignity their illness threatened to destroy.
Under Damien’s
vigorous lead, a sense of dignity and joy - and order - replaced
Molokai’s despair and lawlessness. Neat, painted cottages, many of
which the priest himself constructed, replaced the colony’s
miserable shacks.
He harried the
government authorities. In their eyes he was "obstinate,
headstrong, brusque and officious." Joseph Dutton later on speaks
of him as "vehement and excitable in regard to matters that did
not seem to him right, and he sometimes said and did things that he
afterwards regretted..., but he had a true desire to do right, to
bring about what he thought was best. No doubt he erred sometimes in
judgement.... In certain periods he got along smoothly with everyone,
and at times he was urgent for improvements. In some cases he made for
confusion, as various government authorities would not agree with
him."
In all things his
lepers came first. It would be a mistake, however, to think of Damien
as a single-minded fanatic. He was a human being who was quick to
smile, of pleasant disposition, of open and frank countenance.
No one could deny
that he was a headstrong person. But no one who knew him could deny
that he was a man of warm and tender heart. He quickly forgave
injuries and never bore a grudge.
Charles Warren
Stoddard, an American writer, first visited Molokai in 1868, five
years before Damien’s arrival. He returned in 1884. In place of the
miserable huts of the colony’s beginning, Stoddard now found two
villages of white houses, surrounded by flower gardens and cultivated
fields. Molokai boasted a decent hospital, a graveyard, and two
orphanages filled with children. But what delighted Stoddard most of
all was that the men and women, instead of rotting in the slime,
awaiting death, were out horseback-riding.
In 1888, the
Englishman Edward Clifford visited Damien. "I had gone to Molokai
expecting to find it scarcely less dreadful than hell itself,"
Clifford wrote, "and the cheerful people, the lovely landscapes,
and comparatively painless life were all surprises. These poor people
seemed singularly happy."
Clifford asked lepers
if they missed not being back home. They replied, "Oh, no! We’re
well off here. The government watches over us, the superintendent is
good, and we like our pastor. He builds our houses himself, he gives
us tea, biscuits, sugar and clothes. He takes good care of us and
doesn’t let us want for anything."
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DAMIEN - A WORLD FIGURE
News of Damien’s
deeds spread from Hawaii to Europe to America. The priest of Molokai
became frontpage news. Funds poured in from all over the world. An
Anglican priest, Reverend Hugh Chapman, organized, through the help of
the London Times, a highly successful fund drive. Damien’s notoriety
and fund-raising drew the ire of the Hawaiian government and his own
religious superiors. Both accused him of playing the press for his own
selfish reasons. The government was unhappy, because it felt Damien’s
begging gave the Hawaiian effort to combat leprosy a bad image. Walter
Gibson, Prime Minister of the Hawaiian king, felt that his government
was most generous toward the lepers. It was spending fifty thousand
dollars a year, which represented five percent of its total taxes, on
leper care. No other government in the world could point to such a
proud health-care record.
The superiors of the
Sacred Hearts mission were distressed because they felt Damien was
giving the Congregation’s Fathers and Brothers a bad image. The
press made it seem as if he were the only Sacred Hearts missionary
willing to serve the colony. His superiors knew this was not true. And
they took it as an affront to the whole Congregation. His superiors
further accused Damien of being a "loner" because of his
unhappy relationship with the three assistants they had sent him at
different times. In all fairness, it probably is true that no one else
could have lived with any of the three priests. But no one was more
irritated by Damien’s fame than Hawaii’s Yankee missionaries.
Stern Puritan divines
felt leprosy was the inevitable result of the Hawaiian people’s
licentiousness. In their puritanical judgement the Hawaiian people
were corrupt and debased. The segregation policy would have to be
enforced to hasten the inevitable physical and moral collapse of the
essentially rotten Hawaiian culture. There were medical doctors who
were so convinced of an essential connection between leprosy and
sexual immorality that they insisted that leprosy could be spread only
through sexual contact.
When Damien entered
his prison at Molokai, he had to make a decision. He believed that the
Hawaiians were basically good and not essentially corrupt. And now he
had to show them belief, regardless of the price. Thus, somewhere
during the first part of his stay he made the dread decision to set
aside his fear of contagion. He touched his lepers, he embraced them,
he dined with them, he cleaned and bandaged their wounds and sores. He
placed the host upon their battered mouths. He put his thumb on their
forehead when he anointed them with the holy oil. All these actions
involved touch. Touch is, of course, necessary if one is to
communicate love and concern. The Hawaiians instinctively knew this.
And that is why the Hawaiians shrank from the Yankee divines. Although
these Yankee religious leaders expended much money on their mission
endeavors, few Hawaiians joined their churches. The islanders sensed
the contempt in which the puritan minds held them.
On this altar which
he constructed, Father Damien celebrated Mass each day. From the
Eucharist, the priest drew strength to continue his lonely and
perilous mission. After leprosy claimed him, and he entered into his
"peculiar Golgotha," he found his deepest consolation and
hope in the Mass.
Damien was not, as we
have noted, blind to the Hawaiians’ very real faults. Many
Hawaiians, by their irregular sexual habits, greatly contributed to
the spread of leprosy. But Damien knew that was not the only way the
disease was communicated. Above all, he rejected the insufferable
notion that God had laid this disease as a curse upon these people, to
wipe them off the face of the earth. Damien hated leprosy. He didn’t
see it as a tool of a vengeful God. He saw it as a suffering that man
must eliminate. God loved the leper. No man had the right to scorn
him.
Thus, very early in
his apostolate at Molokai, Damien was impelled to identify himself as
closely as possible with his lepers. Long before he had the disease,
he spoke of himself and the people of Molokai as "we
lepers." Six months after his arrival at Kalawao he wrote his
brother in Europe: "...I make myself a leper with the lepers to
gain all to Jesus Christ. That is why, in preaching, I say ‘we
lepers’; not, ‘my brethren....’"
Damien embraced the
leper but not leprosy. He lived in great dread of the disease. When he
first experienced leprosy’s symptomatic itching, while still a
missionary at Kohala, some years before he went to Molokai, he knew
then that the loathing diseased threatened him. Even when the disease
had run a good bit of its brutal course through his body, he still at
times seemed to refuse to admit he was a victim. But leprosy finally
claimed him. It was the final price God exacted from Damien to show
his sense of community and oneness with his poor afflicted flock.
Some said there was a
connection between leprosy and venereal disease. In order to witness
against those who claimed leprosy could only be spread by sexual
contact, Damien submitted to the indignity of having his blood and
body examined in detail after he had contracted the disease. Doctor
Arning, a world-famous specialist in the disease, reported, after
examination, that Damien had no sign of syphilis. In a signed
statement dictated to Brother Joseph Dutton, his co-worker, Damien
wrote, "I have never had sexual intercourse with anyone
whomsoever."
History has borne out
the wisdom of Damien’s decision to take these embarrassing measures.
Shortly after Damien’s death, a Yankee divine of Honolulu, Doctor
Charles McEwen Hyde, bitterly attacked the priest’s moral life. The
good clergyman opined that Damien got leprosy because he was
licentious.
Father Damien was not
lacking defenders. In a magnificent statement, Robert Louis Stevenson,
who had visited Molokai after Damien’s death, rose to champion the
priest’s cause. The author’s defense of Damien rested upon the
complete sacrifice the man made of his life, a sacrifice no Yankee
missionary in Hawaii had duplicated.
Damien was alone on
the frontier of death. His loneliness oppressed him. He spoke of his
"black thoughts" and the "insupportable melancholy that
arose from his lack of religious companionship." The Board of
Health remonstrated with him because, ignoring the isolation policy,
he climbed up and down the palisades to build chapels and to bring the
Sacraments to the healthy people who dwelt on Molokai’s plateau. His
superiors were displeased with his trips to Honolulu. They felt he
gave bad example in the face of the government’s policy on
segregation of lepers. Furthermore, two Sacred Hearts Fathers,
laboring in other parts of the Hawaiian Islands, had contracted
leprosy. The superiors did not want to force them to Molokai. They
felt that Damien, by leaving the colony, might just precipitate a
government crackdown.
He continually begged
his superiors for a confrere, not only to assist him in the
ever-mounting work, but also to provide spiritual comfort for him. He
hungered above all for a priestly companion to whom he could confess
and receive the Sacrament of Penance. His writings reveal his concern
that he would forget the true purpose of his life. In a little
notebook, he counseled himself: "Be severe toward yourself,
indulgent toward others. Have scrupulous exactitude for everything
regarding God: prayer, meditation, Mass, administration of the
Sacraments. Unite your heart with God ... Remember always your three
vows, by which you are dead to the things of the world. Remember
always that God is eternal and work courageously in order one day to
be united with him forever."
During one time when
the isolation policy was being strictly enforced, a ship’s captain,
reacting to the government’s orders, forbade Damien’s bishop to
disembark on Molokai. In order to see the bishop, Damien sailed out to
the boat. The captain refused Damien’s request to board. The priest
pleaded in vain with the captain, saying that he wanted to confess his
sins. "Bishop," the priest called to the boat, "will
you hear my confession from here?" The bishop consented, and
Damien in an exercise of humility that touched all who witnessed it,
confessed his sins aloud to the bishop.
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DAMIEN THE LEPER
One day in December,
1884, while soaking his feet in extremely hot water, Father De Veuster
experienced no sensation of heat or pain. The evil disease he had
battled for so long now claimed him. In his last years he engaged in a
flurry of activity. He hastened to complete his many building
projects, enlarge his orphanages, organize his work. Help came from
four unexpected sources. A priest, a soldier, a male nurse, and a nun.
The soldier, Joseph Dutton, was the most unusual man. He had survived
Civil War combat, a broken marriage and several years of hard drinking
to show up on Molokai’s shores in July, 1886. He stayed forty-five
years without ever leaving the colony. He served the lepers of the
Baldwin Home for Boys. Joseph was never seriously ill until just
before his death in 1931. He was just short of eighty-eight. Another
layman, James Sinnett, a man who had a colorful and checkered career,
during which he gained some experience in nursing in Mercy Hospital,
Chicago, came to Molokai eight months before Father Damien died. The
leper priest called him "Brother James." He nursed Father
Damien during the final phase of his illness, and closed his eyes in
death. During the last days of Damien’s life, Sinnett served as his
secretary. He was faithful to the very end, and when Damien died,
Sinnett left the colony. Nothing was heard from him thereafter.
Father Louis-Lambert
Conrardy, a fellow Belgian, joined Father Damien May 17, 1888.
Archbishop William Gross of Oregon generously permitted Father
Conrardy to leave his own priest-poor area to labor in Molokai.
Archbishop Gross wrote of Conrardy: "I have trampled all over
Oregon with Father Conrardy and he is a noble, heroic man ... Though
he knows and realizes perfectly that he might succomb to the disease,
his voluntary going is real heroism." Conrardy and Damien joined
in their unreserved dedication to the lepers. Along with this,
Conrardy provided the spiritual and social companionship that Damien
so desperately craved.
The Sister who now
offered at this critical junction support for Damien and his work, was
Mother Marianne Kopp, Superior of the Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse,
New York, who served the Honolulu leper hospital. Damien requested
Mother Marianne to send Sisters to care for the girls’ orphanage at
Molokai. Damien promised her that not one of her Sisters would ever be
afflicted with leprosy. The Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse are still
at Molokai. To this day, not one of them has ever contracted leprosy.
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