Word: damien
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When, in 1873, an obscure young Belgian missionary priest named Father Damien begged the Catholic Prefect Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands to send him to a leper colony 50 miles away, the name of Molokai meant nothing to the outside world. Molokai is an island to which the Hawaiian Government had exiled all its lepers after a frightful outbreak of the disease, a lawless chaos whose 800 foul inhabitants lived a slow death in huts, with only one another's company and the sweet intoxicating juice of the ki tree for distraction. Father Damien changed that...
After eleven years at the Molokai leper colony, Father Damien one Sunday addressed his congregation not with his usual "Brethren," but "We lepers." During the next five years his face took on the leper's look, leonine, patchy, with fierce eyes and thick lips. In 1889 Father Damien died, aged 49. His people buried him in the churchyard...
With passing years the Hawaiian Government moved Martyr Damien's colony from Kalawao to Kalaupapa, some three miles away. Under the leadership of King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, Britons subscribed a granite monument for Damien's grave, a Damien Institute for leprosy study in England. Last year the Hawaiian Territorial Legislature appropriated $3,000 to care for the grave and the church. But the spot remained neglected of men, with few visitors until this week. Then, according to long laid plans, the remains of Father Damien were dug up, started on a journey half way around...
Charnel chaos, forgotten by the outside world, was Hawaii's leper settlement on Molokai Island when in 1873 a young Belgian named Father Damien (Joseph De Veuster) begged his bishop to send him there. Father Damien worked like a beaver to improve the place, made himself and it famous. One Sunday in 1885 he opened his sermon not with the customary "Brethren" but simply: "We lepers...
...Father Damien lived on with his afflicted flock until 1889. Three years before he died he was joined by "Brother Joseph" (Ira Barnes Dutton), a Vermont-born Civil War hero who had been converted and gone to Molokai because he wished to expiate youthful frivolities. In 44 years Brother Joseph left Molokai only once, to have his eyes treated in Honolulu. He died two years ago at 87, but not of leprosy (TIME, April 6, 1931). Last week the world had word of one of Brother Joseph's successors. Father Peter d'Orgueval...