“The Real Damien of Molokai”

Having posted AOC's silly raving here – AOC on Saint Damien of Molokai: "Example of White Supremacist Culture" ,  this is a good article about the wonderful Saint.  It's from the interfaith publication First Things.

Marisol Escobar’s statue of St. Damien of Molokai has graced the statuary hall in the U.S. Capitol since 1969. The people of Hawaii chose this statue to mark their tenth anniversary of statehood. It stands out, in part, because of Escobar’s distinctive blocked style. “Marisol” (as she was called) sculpted her subjects almost as square frames, flattening them like screens upon which she could project her own presence. One critic called this “feminine playfulness” set against square “patriarchy.” Marisol said she simply preferred to see herself in her subjects this way.

Fr. Damien was born Jozef De Veuster in Tremelo, Belgium, on January 3, 1840. At age nineteen he entered the novitiate of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary—an order that had formed amid the upheavals of the French Revolution. These priests had refused to join the republic’s “Civil Constitution of the Clergy.” Far from being “colonialist,” the order was founded by priests in exile who wanted only to conform souls to “the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary.”

The congregation (nicknamed the “Picpus Fathers” after their founder’s town in France) devoted themselves to missionary work in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, including the Kingdom of Hawaii. The first six bishops of Hawaii were all members of this Congregation. After Jozef De Veuster’s formation, the order sent him to the Hawaiian mission. In 1864 he chose a new religious name, Damien, and gave his life in service to the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary—not patriarchy and white supremacist culture. The bishop ordained Damien a priest as soon as he arrived in May of that year.

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The Hawaiians decided upon a more drastic form of quarantine: deportation to the nearby island of Molokai. Without the solace of their families, or the church, Hawaiian lepers were essentially exiled. Supplies and new lepers came to the island every couple of months, but the diseased were cut off from communication with friends or family.

The Picpus Fathers, concerned about these souls in exile, agonized over how to extend their mission to this place of death and disease. Bishop Louis Maigret knew he could not ask any man to go “in obedience” on a mission that was likely a death sentence. Though he would not send anyone by his own command, he gathered his priests and asked if anyone believed he was being called by God to make an extraordinary sacrifice. Only four men volunteered. The bishop determined that each would serve successively for three months, in hopes of mitigating their chances of infection. Fr. Damien went first to establish a parish for the lepers, with the idea that other priests would rotate in to relieve him. But as the months turned into years, the other priests never came, and from 1873 to 1889, Fr. Damien stayed in Molokai as “Apostle to the Exiles.”