Saint Damien of Molokai will be remembered on May 10

Catholic News Agency:

The Catholic Church will remember St. Damien of Molokai on May 10. The Belgian priest sacrificed his life and health to become a spiritual father to the victims of leprosy quarantined on a Hawaiian island.

Joseph de Veuser, who later took the name Damien in religious life, was born into a farming family in the Belgian town of Tremlo in 1840. During his youth he felt a calling to become a Catholic missionary, an urge that prompted him to join the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

Damien's final vows to the congregation involved a dramatic ceremony in which his superiors draped him in the cloth that would be used to cover his coffin after death. The custom was meant to symbolize the young man's solemn commitment, and his identification with Christ's own death. For Damien, the event would become more significant, as he would go on to lay down his life for the lepers of Molokai.

His superiors originally intended to send Damien's brother, a member of the same congregation, to Hawaii. But he became sick, and Damien arranged to take his place. Damien arrived in Honolulu in 1864, less than a century after Europeans had begun to establish a presence in Hawaii. He was ordained a priest the same year.

During his ninth year of the priesthood, Father Damien responded to his bishop's call for priests to serve on the leper colony of Molokai. A lack of previous exposure to leprosy, which had no treatment at the time, made the Hawaiian natives especially susceptible to the infection. Molokai became a quarantine center for the victims, who became disfigured and debilitated as the disease progressed.

The island had become a wasteland in human terms, despite its natural beauty. The leprosy victims of Molokai faced hopeless conditions and extreme deprivation, sometimes lacking not only basic palliative care but even the means of survival.

Inwardly, Fr. Damien was terrified by the prospect of contracting leprosy himself. However, he knew that he would have to set aside this fear in order to convey God's love to the lepers in the most authentic way. Other missionaries had kept the lepers at arms' length, but Fr. Damien chose to immerse himself in their common life and leave the outcome to God.

The inhabitants of Molokai saw the difference in the new priest's approach, and embraced his efforts to improve their living conditions. A strong man, accustomed to physical labor, he performed the Church's traditional works of mercy – such as feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and giving proper burial to the dead – in the face of suffering that others could hardly even bear to see.

Fr. Damien's work helped to raise the lepers up from their physical sufferings, while also making them aware of their worth as beloved children of God. Although he could not take away the constant presence of death in the leper colony, he could change its meaning and inspire hope. The death-sentence of leprosy could, and often did, become a painful yet redemptive path toward eternal life.

The priest's devotion to his people, and his activism on their behalf, sometimes alienated him from officials of the Hawaiian kingdom and from his religious superiors in Europe. His mission was not only fateful, but also lonely. He drew strength from Eucharistic adoration and the celebration of the Mass, but longed for another priest to arrive so that he could receive the sacrament of confession regularly.

In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had lost all feeling in his feet. It was an early, but unmistakable sign that he had contracted leprosy. The priest knew that his time was short. He undertook to finish whatever accomplishments he could, on behalf of his fellow colony residents, before the diseased robbed him of his eyesight, speech and mobility.

Fr. Damien suffered humiliations and personal trials during his final years. An American Protestant minister accused him of scandalous behavior, based on the contemporary belief that leprosy was a sexually transmitted disease. He ran into disagreements with his religious superiors, and felt psychologically tormented by the notion that his work had been a failure.

In the end, priests of his congregation arrived to administer the last sacraments to the dying priest. During the Spring of 1889, Fr. Damien told his friends that he believed it was God's will for him to spend the upcoming Easter not on Molokai, but in heaven. He died of leprosy during Holy Week, on April 15, 1889.

St. Damien of Molokai was beatified in 1995. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2009.

A tree planted by Saint Damien continues his good works...

from Hawaiian Catholic Herald...

With its wood, the tree honors the foot that pushed the shovel that planted it.

Like many stories in Hawaii, the story of the box holding St. Damien’s relic, fragments of the saint’s foot bone, unfolds in many wonderful directions.

Telling it last week, with enthusiasm by phone from Makawao, Maui, was Edwin Ferreira.

It starts with a troupe of trees, seven or eight monkeypods that Father Damien planted to provide shade near the church he built in the late 1800s in Kaluaaha, Molokai.

That’s how Ferreira pictured it. “Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Church is in a hot and dry area,” he said.

A hundred years later, sometime in the 1980s, lightning struck one of the trees, killing it. It had to be cut down so it would not fall and damage the church.

Ferreira, whose job as construction supervisor for the phone company sent him to Molokai from time to time, knew the man who cut down the tree. He asked him if he could have some of the wood.

Ferreira took a 100-pound slab back to his home in Makawao. The lightning had damaged some of the wood, making it dry and porous, but toward the center of the thick truck, it was dense and beautiful.

When Ferreira told his pastor, Sacred Hearts Father Joseph Hendriks, what he had, the priest asked the part-time craftsman, whom he had nicknamed Michelangelo, if he would make a display for a relic he had of Father Damien, a small lock of his hair. Ferreira did.

Several years later, after Father Damien was beatified, Ferreira discovered by chance that the envelope that had held the priest’s hair still contained a single strand hidden in one of the envelope’s creases.

He called Father Hendriks, who was then pastor of St. Francis Parish in Kalaupapa, to ask what he should do with it.

“Bring honor to Blessed Damien,” Father Hendriks told Ferreira.

So the Maui man took some of the wood and made a representation of the Kalaupapa peninsula and the Molokai cliffs. He then placed in the display a foot-high cross in which he imbedded a gold reliquary holding Damien’s hair. It was a personal sacred art piece which he would share with his parish.

Three years ago, Ferreira’s wife Olivia was discovered to have what appeared to be stage three or stage four cancer in her intestine. After a grim prognosis from an Oahu specialist, she had surgery. Amazingly, after the tumor was removed, tests declared her completely free of cancer cells.

The doctor said the happy outcome was highly unusual. But Ferreira called it a “miracle” attributable to his personal link to Blessed Damien, Damien’s tree, and his daily treks from Queen’s Medical Center to pray in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.

In gratitude, Ferreira gave his Kalaupapa cross reliquary to Molokai-born Sacred Hearts Father Lane Akiona, the pastor of Ferreira’s boyhood parish of St. Augustine in Waikiki, who had anointed Olivia and prayed over her when she first came to Oahu for treatment.

“This is yours,” he told Father Akiona. “You can do more with this that I can in Makawao.”

Meanwhile, Ferreira had received requests for pieces of the wood — which could be classified as secondary relics — to be used as aids in prayer for people who were sick.

Ferreira brought some pieces to the bedside of a critically ill friend at Maui Memorial Medical Center where friends and family were praying for healing. A large Hawaiian man from Molokai in the next bed over asked if they would pray over him too.

The next day, the Hawaiian’s scheduled leg amputation was cancelled. He had taken an unexpected turn for the better.

And a couple weeks ago, Ferreira saw his formerly hospitalized friend healthy and in church, a place he hadn’t been in years.

The scenario seemed to repeat itself in the home of another Maui man suffering from inoperable cancer.

“We all got together and went over to his house,” Ferreira said. “He was very gray, and could barely walk.”

“We prayed the rosary, laid hands on him, and prayed for his immediate healing,” he said. As they watched, his color came back.

In the latest update, Ferreira said, “He’s feeding his horses and he’s looking very good.”

They are continuing to pray for him.

When Bishop Larry Silva asked Ferreira if he would make the reliquary for the new traveling relic, Ferreira turned to his friend Allan Marciel who, he said, had the better workshop.

Ferreira designed the box and Marciel did most of the handiwork. Another friend cut the display glass.

The box now holds pieces of bone from a larger relic of St. Damien. 

Ferreira also used some of the wood to make a pectoral cross for Bishop Silva.

Ferreira has been running leftover wood through his band saw, creating thin flat pieces about an inch or two long that he places in individual plastic zip-lock bags and gives away as St. Damien relics. Some of the pieces are blackened, burned by the lighting strike that killed the tree.

He had them blessed and has offered them to fellow parishioners at St. Joseph Church in Makawao, and to the bishop and friends and acquaintances.

Ferreira said that he feels compelled to tell the stories of St. Damien’s wood because of all the good things he has seen.

“If it sounds like I’m bragging, I am bragging in Jesus’ name,” he said.