Today is neither this saint’s feast day nor his birthday — I simply remembered him and decided to publish a text about him. A great figure of the Catholic Church. An example for all humanity.
Saint Damian was born as the seventh of eight children, four of whom responded to a spiritual calling. He was born as Joseph (Jozef) de Veuster, into a Flemish family on January 3, 1840, in Tremelo, Belgium.
Little is known about his childhood, but one thing is certain: it was imbued with warmth and deep Catholic faith. Some biographers, like Hünermann, see his boyhood days filled with high ideals.
He dreamed of becoming a hero like the Lion of Flanders.
Little Joseph wanted to slay a dragon or a giant or something of that sort, and he also wanted to become the Pope. But he quickly realized that heroes do not have to be great; he understood that great people do not always have to be big and strong; he realized that a mother who strives to raise her children well is a heroine, and that a father who works hard to feed all the hungry mouths is a hero, and that one can become a hero even in the desert, in a solitary cell.
Joseph followed one of his brothers into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and took the name Damian. Initially, he was accepted as a lay brother assistant, and only later as a priestly candidate. His older brother Pamphile was designated for the missions, but since he was prevented by illness, Damian volunteered in his place, even though he had not yet been ordained. He received the orders of subdiaconate, diaconate, and then priesthood in Honolulu.
At that time, Hawaii was struck by a plague, so they designated an island where the infected would live. It was the island of Molokai - an island of misery, wrath, and death, an island of lepers.
In the paradisiacal archipelago of Hawaii, this place resembled more of a hell; it was called the hell of the South Sea. It was a place everyone dreaded. It was there that Father Damian arrived on May 10, 1873. He was 33 years old and the only healthy person among an estimated 800 lepers living on Molokai at that time.
Apathy, lawlessness, and immorality reigned on the island. These people were left to die.
It was truly hell until he came, the Flemish hero; oh how foul were the wounds, how hard it was to look at decaying faces and limbs on which only stumps remained, but this is how heroes are made, right?
He organized religious life on the island, even perpetual adoration.
He built them a church, houses, a school, roads, a hospital, an orphanage.
He taught them to cultivate gardens.
He dressed their ulcers, built a water reservoir, made coffins, dug graves, distributed pipes and ate with them, providing medical and emotional support.
In 1875 Bishop Maigret visited him and was amazed by all he had achieved. The word about Father Damian spread across America and Europe.
While Friedrich Nietzsche was thundering across Europe that “God is dead,” at the same time, a devout and merciful priest from the periphery convinced the world that God very much lives in the small, the rejected, in people on the fringes of society.
In those whom Nietzsche would have left to die, but not Damian, saints act differently.
One morning in 1885, he wanted to wash his feet, a lady had heated the water too much so she called out to him to be careful not to scald himself, but he already had his feet in the boiling water and felt nothing, he knew immediately that he had fallen ill.
Most likely through the pipe that one of the boys had been smoking secretly.
When the boy realized that father was infected, he came in tears to confess his guilt.
Seeing the boy in tears, Father Damian took him on his lap and showed him the pipe, and being the joker that he was, explained to him that plague cannot enter through such a small hole on a pipe.
At no point during his illness did he stop caring for his sufferers.
All this Father Damian had stated at the beginning of his apostolate: If God gives me strength, I will carry your cross too, I will be a leper among lepers.
Father Damian died on Holy Monday, at 8:00 AM on April 15, 1889, at the age of 49.
And at his last farewell on the cross was written: There is no greater love than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
St. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Leuven in 1995, and Pope Benedict XVI canonized him on October 11, 2009.
The remains of Father Damian were transported to Belgium in 1936. In 2005, he was declared the greatest Belgian of all time.
Look at this picture, look at it well and remember it…, that is not the face of a leper, it is the face of love.
LITERATURE: Wilhelm Hünermann, The Priest of the Exiles (Damian de Veuster), UPT, Đakovo, 2007.
