By James Drane

For just a quick moment, there was a reference in the print media to the canonization of a new saint, Father Damien (1840-1889), born Joseph Damien de Veuster. When he was 20 years old he joined a religious community and traveled to Hawaii as a missionary.

While still a young priest working in a parish, he heard about the island of Molokai where persons suffering from leprosy were sent, or more accurately were dumped. These persons suffered from a disease for which there was no cure. In fact, there was widespread misunderstanding of the disease, which caused a frightening physical disfiguration. Father Damien decided to join the isolated lepers in order to help them and to serve them. Years later, he became infected himself and died of the disease.

Damien was a modestly educated 19th century person whose understanding of disease and his approach to those who were ill was strikingly 20th century. In Hawaii at his time and elsewhere around the world, lepers were seen as unclean and suffering because of their sins. This misconception has roots in the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. Damien ignored this view. Following Jesus’ example he reached out to lepers as decent people, whose disease was something physical rather than moral. He ate with them, worked with them, cared for them, and prayed with them. He was their priest and doctor, builder and social worker. He served the isolated lepers until his own death.

Most persons in today’s secular culture have little interest in news from the Vatican about the canonization of a new saint. Protestants moved away from the veneration of saints early in the Reformation movement. Some Catholics still read about saints and pray for their help, but not many. Persons suffering today from leprosy will celebrate the news of Father Damien’s canonization and so will many Hawaiians. What I hope will attract some attention even in today’s secular population is what Father Damien had to go through in order to be canonized.

In the long-standing Catholic process of canonization, an important role is assigned to a figure called Advocatus Diaboli — the Devil’s Advocate. A lawyer for the candidate to sainthood must bring evidence of saintliness, including two proven miracles attributed to his intervention. The Devil’s Advocate attempts to disprove every bit of claimed evidence of sainthood. Father Damien is officially recognized now as a saint, which means that he survived this rigorous critical procedure.

Father Damien probably looked down from heaven at the Vatican procedure as a picnic compared to the critical experiences that he underwent during his lifetime. The really tough criticisms came from a different ecclesiastical source, a Protestant minister, the Rev. Dr. C. M. Hyde, who issued his harsh criticisms of Father Damien from background biblical assumptions about the disease of leprosy that go back centuries. Leprosy was considered a punishment for sin and therefore Father Damien, who contracted the disease, was criticized in public as the worst of all sinners. The disease was believed to be transmitted sexually, so Father Damien was accused of having sexual relations with lepers. In the words of Hyde (Presbyterian, Oct. 26, 1889), Damien was “a dirty man, headstrong and bigoted.”

Any improvements which had taken place at the leprosarium, according to Hyde, were not the work of Father Damien, but of a Board of Health. He did no good. His leprosy was due to his vices. Rev. Hyde’s fellow ministers, he insisted, did more good than this sinner. Long before the Vatican started a critical review of Damien’s life, he went through a much tougher and much more painful procedure. The toughest Advocatus Diaboli was not a canon lawyer at the Vatican. Rather, he was a rich cleric who lived in an enormous mansion and never visited one place where Father Damien lived and died. Hyde himself was responded to by none other than Robert Louis Stevenson.

There is a lesson in this story for both believers and nonbelievers. The toughest criticisms, in fact the worst violence, often come from persons with strong religious beliefs. Religious believers have to review from time to time their convictions in order to make sure that they do not subvert decent relationships with other human beings. The worst religious scandals and the strongest supports for unbelief come from a history of distorted religious viewpoints, even massive killings of some believers by other believers. The recent Hutu killings of Tutsis in Africa are just one example of just this kind of genocide.

The canonization of Father Damien provides a secularized American population with a quick and short look at a 19th century saint who had a 20th century viewpoint on a pathology now called Hansen’s disease. He saw it as a physical, not a moral, ailment. He reached out to people who were not his own, but different, then served as their builder, doctor, priest and community organizer. He turned around a frightening human tendency first to discriminate, then to hate and hurt those who are different. He endured a critical and hurtful response to all that he did during his life.

We all have our experiences with Advocati Diaboli and their continuing criticisms. Damien left us with a hopeful message. We too can survive. Thank you, Father Damien.



Drane is Russell B. Roth Professor of Bioethics at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.