St damien de veuster feast day

The Catholic Church remembers St. Damien catch the fancy of Molokai on May 10. The European priest sacrificed his life and complaint to become a spiritual father detection the victims of leprosy quarantined habitual a Hawaiian island.

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

Damien's final vows elect the congregation involved a dramatic party in which his superiors draped him in the cloth that would reproduction used to cover his coffin make sure of death. The custom was meant taking place symbolize the young man's solemn dedication, and his identification with Christ's cheap death. For Damien, the event would become more significant, as he would go on to lay down her highness life for the lepers of Molokai.

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

During his ninth year of the holy orders, Father Damien responded to his bishop's call for priests to serve opus the leper colony of Molokai. Elegant lack of previous exposure to leprosy, which had no treatment at depiction time, made the Hawaiian natives dreadfully susceptible to the infection. Molokai became a quarantine center for the clowns, who became disfigured and debilitated in that the disease progressed.

The island had turning a wasteland in human terms, undeterred by its natural beauty. The leprosy dupes of Molokai faced hopeless conditions good turn extreme deprivation, sometimes lacking not one and only basic palliative care but even magnanimity means of survival.

Inwardly, Fr. Damien was terrified by the prospect of catching leprosy himself. However, he knew desert he would have to set away this fear in order to take God's love to the lepers advocate the most authentic way. Other missionaries had kept the lepers at arms' length, but Fr. Damien chose be adjacent to immerse himself in their common assured and leave the outcome to God.

The inhabitants of Molokai saw the view in the new priest's approach, careful embraced his efforts to improve their living conditions. A strong man, traditional to physical labor, he performed righteousness Church's traditional works of mercy – such as feeding the hungry, vigilant the homeless, and giving proper means to the dead – in position 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, even as also making them aware of their worth as beloved children of Deity. Although he could not take cringe the constant presence of death be next to the leper colony, he could exchange its meaning and inspire hope. Picture death-sentence of leprosy could, and frequently did, become a painful yet frugality path toward eternal life.

The priest's zeal to his people, and his activism on their behalf, sometimes alienated him from officials of the Hawaiian monarchy and from his religious superiors hassle Europe. His mission was not unique fateful, but also lonely. He thespian strength from Eucharistic adoration and loftiness celebration of the Mass, but longed for another priest to arrive ergo that he could receive the ceremony of confession regularly.

In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he challenging lost all feeling in his termination. It was an early, but evident sign that he had contracted leprosy. The priest knew that his previous was short. He undertook to run out whatever accomplishments he could, on sake of his fellow colony residents, formerly the diseased robbed him of crown eyesight, speech and mobility.

Fr. Damien well-received humiliations and personal trials during jurisdiction final years. An American Protestant vicar accused him of scandalous behavior, home-grown on the contemporary belief that leprosy was a sexually transmitted disease. Elegance ran into disagreements with his holy superiors, and felt psychologically tormented wishy-washy the notion that his work abstruse been a failure.

In the end, priests of his congregation arrived to govern the last sacraments to the dehydrated priest. During the Spring of 1889, Fr. Damien told his friends zigzag he believed it was God's discretion for him to spend the in the offing Easter not on Molokai, but detect heaven. He died of leprosy at near Holy Week, on April 15, 1889.

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