Sorry for getting this up late – I was working on it last night, but got distracted. Things have grown a bit slow around here, so perhaps I’ll make up for it by posting twice today. Here I wanted to post some excerpts from a rather interesting document I stumbled on yesterday while I was reading up on (Bl.) Fr. Damien de Veuster, the leper priest of the Hawaiian Islands. A friend of mine recently had a vacation in Hawaii, and saw (from the air) the leper colony of the Kalaupapa peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. I’d heard of the leper colony before, but I confess I’d never heard the story of Fr. Damien de Veuster. So I did some online research, which inspired me to write this post.

Probably many of you know the story already, but for those who don’t, he was a priest who volunteered to minister to the lepers of Kalaupapa in the late 19th century. Leprosy came to Hawaii (probably from China) in 1848, and spread among the inhabitants with fearful speed. Containment was essential, and an isolated portion of the island of Molokai was thus designated as a leper colony. The arrangement does not seem to have been very charitable. As in so many other places, the people’s great fear of the disease meant very poor treatment for its victims. According to the stories, lepers were often dropped over the sides of boats and told to swim to shore on their own. Such supplies as were offered them were given in the same way, so that many washed out to sea, and in the early years no regular arrangements were made for giving them the medical care that they obviously needed.

Fr. Damien (I am not normally given to calling priests by their first names, but in this case history seems universally agreed on ‘Fr. Damien’) arrived in 1873. One can only imagine the piteous state that the colony must have been in. There the good priest ministered to the people’s spiritual needs, and at the same time supervised the building of houses, churches, and hospitals. He traveled back and forth to the mainland to ensure that the colony got adequate supplies, including medical supplies. He ensured that the dead were all decently buried. Especially, he was said to have compassion on the children (many of whom had been torn from their parents when they were diagnosed from the disease); to them he was as a parent. And after doing so much good there, he was by all reports not dismayed when he became one of them in earnest: in 1885 he announced that he himself had become a leper, and he died four years later. However, in the time of his residence there, Fr. Damien had managed to attract a Catholic brother, as well as some sisters. They continued his work, and Fr. Damien is still viewed as a humanitarian hero by the people of the Hawaiian islands. John Paul II beatified him in 1995.

One of the more interesting twists to the story came after the death of Fr. Damien, when something of a sectarian conflict broke out, revolving around the question of the good priest’s virtue. It seems that an Australian Presbyterian minister had grown tired of reading effusive praise of Fr. Damien in the local press following his death in 1889. He wrote to a colleague, the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, asking for details. Evidently Mr. Hyde was also a bit jealous of the priest’s notoriety; in any case, he provided details quite willingly in the form of an unflattering description of Damien, which Gage subsequently published in the Sydney Presbyterian. It ran as follows:

“”Dear Brother,–In answer to your inquires about Father Damien, I can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist. The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided. He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness. Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life.–Yours, etc.,

What the Presbyterians of Sydney thought in general, I could not say. One reader, however, did not enjoy the letter. Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous Scottish children’s author and himself a Presbyterian, read the piece and was outraged. He himself had actually visited Molokai not long after Damien’s death, and had been filled with admiration for the man’s good works. He sat down and penned an angry letter, which he sent to the Sydney Morning Herald. I will not include this one in its entirety; it is as long and redundant as something that I might write under the circumstances. Much of it is devoted to repeating the accusation that Hyde is excessively rich and materially comfortable, and jealous of Fr. Damien because he sees that the priest is the better man, who did the good office that Hyde himself ought to have done. Stevenson’s contempt for the life of comfort is emphasized multiple times. (Presumably he did know something about Hyde’s lifestyle, having visited him on that same trip to the Hawaiian Islands which allowed him to see Kalaupapa.)

Still, the letter does have its points of interest, not least of all in virtue of its author. I’m probably not the only one here who loved A Child’s Garden of Verses,” and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in my early years. But also, it is a case of a Presbyterian publicly chastising a minister of his own denomination on a Catholic’s behalf. And he does so in words harsh enough even for the taste of traditional Catholics! Consider his introduction, in which he acknowledges the gratitude that he would normally have for Hyde’s hospitality to him on his visit, but says that, “Your letter to the Reverend H.B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude.” Obviously Stevenson means business.

But the letter is interesting also in that it makes clear that Stevenson is not guilty of indifferentism. Though his outrage is primarily inspired by Hyde’s indecency in slandering a good man, he also seems regretful that the Presbyterians could not have had a better showing in what he seems to have regarded, in part, as a contest of goodness. Hyde is guilty, not only of meanness and jealousy, but also of letting the Catholics win, and Stevenson is suggesting that he should at least have salvaged the situation by being a good sport about it.

“When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a lady, and
the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as will sometimes
happen) matter damaging to the successful rival’s credit reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily closed. Your Church and Damien’s were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help, to edify, to set divine examples. You having (in one huge instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to you that you were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your well-being, in your pleasant room–and Damien, crowned with glories and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of Kalawao–you, the elect who would not, were the last man on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would and did.”

He goes on to praise Fr. Damien’s courage and goodness in such colorful language as might satisfy even our good patron, St. Louis de Montfort.

“When I was pulled ashore there one early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human life. One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from joining her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare–what a haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have felt it was (even today) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of possible infection. That seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the disgust of the visitor’s surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes. I do not think I am a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the days and nights I spent upon that island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else. I find in my diary that I speak of my stay as a “grinding experience”: I have once jotted in the margin, “_Harrowing_ is the word”; and when the _Mokolii_ bore me at last towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song–

‘Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.’

And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged, bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop- Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place when Damien came there and made this great renunciation, and slept that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.”

After this, however, there is some account of the faults for which Stevenson takes Fr. Damien to be genuinely accountable. All his testimony on this point is taken from Protestant witnesses, some of whom had bones of one kind or another to pick with Fr. Damien. Even so, the worst criticism in Stevenson’s eyes seems to stem from the fact that the priest was uncertain for a time whether his humanitarian activities ought to focus particularly on the welfare of the Catholics in the settlement. He seems to have eventually decided against this sort of targeted project, for which Stevenson naturally commends him. But Stevenson makes no secret of his belief that Fr. Damien’s spiritual ministrations did not, in themselves, please or impress him. He is perfectly happy to conceded Hyde’s point that Fr. Damien was a bigot, by which he seems to mean, one who genuinely believed his Catholic faith.

“I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me. But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish in a priest? Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do. For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character, should have avoided him in life. But the point of interest in Damien, which has caused him to be so much talked about and made him at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry, his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened him to be one of the world’s heroes and exemplars.”

One does get rather the impression that Catholicity is, for Stevenson, a feature to be forgiven, not praised. Still, he does at least acknowledge that Fr. Damien’s own goodness was bred by his faith. It would have been a lovely thing for Robert Louis Stevenson to convert to Catholicism, but, after reading this letter, one can hardly feel surprise that this never happened. Even so, it is good to see that he was able to recognize a virtuous man when he saw one, and was not above admitting it even when this seemed to be giving points to the other side. It is always interesting to read accounts of saints (or, in this case, those who have been beatified) by those who were not inclined to like them for the sake of the faith. To us, even the complaints often seem more like compliments, but such accounts have the added virtue of appearing more credible in the eyes of people who would normally be hostile to our faith. Let us hope that Robert Louis Stevenson’s efforts on behalf of this good missionary worked for the good of his own soul, and the souls of those Protestants who read him.