St. Damien of Molokai

Who they were

Damien was a Belgian farm boy who took his sick brother's place on a mission ship to Hawaii. In 1873, when the kingdom was exiling its leprosy patients to a peninsula on Molokai cut off by sea cliffs, sent there to die, without law, medicine, or burial, Damien volunteered to go, knowing the assignment had no return. He built houses, a water system, coffins, and a church; he ate from the common pot, dressed the wounds himself, and buried the dead with his own hands, more than a thousand of them. Eleven years in, he spilled boiling water on his foot and felt nothing, and began his next sermon "We lepers." He worked five more years with the disease and died on the island at forty-nine. When a clergyman published an attack on his character after his death, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the defense that buried it. Canonized 2009.

Why people turn to St. Damien of Molokai

He is the saint of everyone a society decides it is done with. In the 1980s, AIDS patients and their caregivers adopted him, and the Church affirmed the patronage.

How to ask their intercession

For someone shunned, by illness, by circumstance, by a family, ask Damien to pray for them and for one person to stand with them. Sensitive-protocol page: no app CTA in body. ---