The Real Damien of Molokai

From First Things:

 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.

Leprosy was not well understood in the nineteenth century, but Hawaii had an outbreak of it at this time. The Hawaiian government quarantined the patients in a hospital, and doctors studied the disease. The leprosy sores would come and go, but come back again as ulcers susceptible to infection. Fingers or toes would go numb until they were lost. The disease could take even whole limbs. As lepers increased, so did panic about a contagion that seemed resistant to all cure.

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.”

When he arrived in Molokai, the leper colony was a place of anarchy. The strong stole from the weak, the women were forced into prostitution, many children were orphaned, and the men made stills to enable constant drunkenness. The putrid odor of the sickest lepers required another exile to the “death sheds,” filled with souls whose bodies could no longer move. They received no visitors, no human touch, no consoling embraces—save Fr. Damien, who would bring them meals and say his Rosary over them every evening, smoking a pipe so he could tolerate the stench of the disease. He would beg them to ask for the sacraments. When lepers died, he built the coffins and buried them with the dignity of the Church’s prayers. This was fatherhood, not patriarchy.

Fr. Damien knew that he might contract leprosy, but he believed that God could protect him from the disease for as long as he was needed. Abandoning himself to this hope, he physically embraced lepers. He shook their hands and hugged them as human beings in pain. He let leper boys serve at the altar, and even touch the chalice. He dressed their wounds. He organized sports for the orphaned children, and treated them as if they were his own. He put the healthiest into work crews and taught them how to plant crops and build schools, roads, an orphanage, a hospital, a graveyard. Fr. Damien took a hopeless pool of anarchic humanity and gave it dignity, work, and love. Most important, he begged the lepers to let God’s love touch them in the sacraments. Miraculously, God protected Damien from leprosy for eleven years.

But the spots appeared eventually. Fr. Damien’s foot grew numb. He began to have “the smell of his sheep.” He had always known that he was in Molokai to save souls, and to unite the suffering of lepers to Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. But he came to believe that he was also in Molokai to suffer for the sake of God’s love. For the next five years, Hansen's Disease slowly ravaged his body, and the lepers saw their own suffering united to Christ’s sacrifice in the Mass in a new way. By the time Fr. Damien died in 1889, more than 600 of Molokai’s 1,000 lepers were Catholics devoted to the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary.

The prime minister of Hawaii called him “a Christian hero.” The princess of the Kingdom of Hawaii bestowed upon him the highest honors of her people. Hawaiians erected a statue of this “white man” in front of the state capitol building out of admiration for his heroic example. When the Church beatified Fr. Damien in 2009, President Barack Obama, who was raised in Honolulu, praised him as “a voice for the voiceless.” But he was more than that. Fr. Damien was a witness to God’s presence among the forsaken, and he died a priest of Jesus Christ surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

In the eyes of many, Fr. Damien is merely “a white man.” But the flattened image that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez says honors “colonialism,” “patriarchy,” and “white supremacist culture” is not the real Damien. The congresswoman’s narrative, filled with its own curious form of hate, dehumanizes the man who exemplifies what it means to cherish human dignity. Her woke resistance is resistance to reality. The real Damien, St. Damien of Molokai, points us to a superior resistance that doesn’t deconstruct reality, but rather reveals it. (Read more.) 

 

 

 From Tom Piatak at American Remnant:

Admirers of Fr. Damien, of whom I am one, were upset. But AOC is not backing down. Instead, she tweeted with approval the charge that her critics are showing “super bad faith” by misunderstanding her point. Fr. Damien’s statue doesn’t have to go because he was a bad man. Fr. Damien’s statue has to go because he was a white man, and we have far more statues of white men standing in Washington than AOC thinks is suitable.

There is a word for the belief that an individual should be excluded because of his skin color, without regard to his personal merits, but the problematic nature of white men in this summer of Wokeness is so taken for granted that wanting to rid Capitol Hill of most statues of white men is seen as an adequate defense to the charge of wanting to rid Capitol Hill of the statue of any particular white man.

 

AOC also tweeted that “every single statue there could be of a canonized saint and that *still* doesn’t change the fact that the erasure of women & BIPOC from American history is a feature of white supremacy.” Applied to the particulars of Fr. Damien’s case, this claim suggests that the native Hawaiians were doing an exemplary job of dealing with the lepers exiled to Molokai, but the white supremacist narrative gave credit to Fr. Damien instead.

 

The only problem with this is that it isn’t true. That is why native Hawaiians, including the Queen whose statue AOC thinks should replace Damien’s, honored the Flemish priest during his lifetime. Being banished to the leper colony at Kalawao was an exceedingly grim fate before the indefatigable “colonizer” from Flanders arrived. (Read more.)

 

 

From Dr. Anthony Esolen at The Catholic Thing:

 

 Ocasio-Cortez is not the future of the Catholic Church. She is not the future of anything that has a future. She cannot be. She is a rather stupid woman, without the learning that comes from arts and letters, or the experience that comes from struggling with the natural world and its resistance to human will. She is neither a scholar nor a farmer. She can neither parse a sentence nor dig a well.

Her youth (she was born in 1989) might beg for some clemency, except that she shows no inclination to learn from her elders. Indeed, a few days ago she spoke out against a Hawaiian memorial to Saint Damien, the priest who gave his life to bring the lepers of Molokai out of their abandonment and squalor. He too was, for her, but an exemplar of white colonialism.

What staggers me is how an editor, even an editor of the National Catholic Reporter, could say something so silly. I think I have the answer. It comes to me by way of Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel, And Quiet Flows the Don (1928-1940): Political ideology makes man stupid. Political ideology is an index card onto which you aim to sum up the whole experience of mankind. Political ideology is to wisdom as a paint-by-numbers portrait of Stalin (or Mussolini, or Mao, or any ideologue) is to the Mona Lisa.

Maxim Gorki said that And Quiet Flows the Don “can only be compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” There is no comparison. Tolstoy is the moral philosopher with profound insight into human good and evil, who drinks from the springs of a faith that is two thousand years old. Sholokhov has no such insight, and his water is bottled by Karl Marx. The Los Angeles Times said that “this book is an experience, just as The Brothers Karamazov is an experience.” No, it is not. Dostoyevsky is in conversation with a gallery of great thinkers, saints, and villains. Sholokhov is in conversation with Lenin and Stalin. (Read more.)

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