Where did Blessed Damien of Molokai grow up and live?

📍Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaii, USA

1873 – 1889

“I was born Jozef De Veuster in Belgium in 1840 and I arrived on the island of Molokai in Hawaii in 1873, sent to serve the colony of people with leprosy — Hansen's disease — who had been forcibly exiled to the Kalaupapa peninsula, a remote shelf of land cut off from the rest of the island by the highest sea cliffs in the world. What I found was not a community but an abandonment: people left to die without medical care, without proper shelter, without the sacraments, without dignity. I stayed. I built houses and a church, organised water supplies, dressed wounds, made coffins, buried the dead. I contracted leprosy myself in 1885 and continued working. I died at Kalaupapa in 1889 at the age of forty-nine, having given sixteen years to people the world had decided to forget. The peninsula, with its cliffs and its sea, was one of the most beautiful places I ever saw, which seemed important somehow.”

👍 LovedThe extraordinary natural beauty of Kalaupapa — the cliffs, the sea, the remoteness that made it feel set apart from the rest of the world. The community that formed among the patients as conditions improved. The clarity of a vocation completely fulfilled.

👎 DislikedThe conditions I found on arrival — the lawlessness, the despair, the lack of any basic provision for human dignity. The progression of my own disease in the final years. The isolation from my religious community and from the world beyond the cliffs.

Map showing where Blessed Damien of Molokai lived — Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaii, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Daws, G. Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai (1984), Harper & Row; Stewart, R. De Veuster of Molokai: The Life of Father Damien (1998); Kalaupapa National Historical Park archives