Where Is Your Molokai

Damien DeVeuster was a Belgian Priest who gave his life to the care of lepers in the colony at Molokai, Hawaii. He died in eighteen hundred and eighty-nine at age forty-nine. Molokai is the island where lepers were sent to rot and die, literally. Partly as a carryover from the myths of those who lived in Biblical times, a leper was considered unclean and cursed and a person to be isolated from “clean” society. And for many years these unfortunate people were dispatched to Molokai where they were left to die in the most horrible conditions. Damien, as a young priest, felt that when Jesus said “You shall be witnesses in Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth,” it included the Island of Molokai. Nobody else, it seems, had figured that out yet. But Damien had. He asked his bishop for permission to move to the island and be with the people and do what he could. The bishop loved this young priest,…