Chapter 26

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.