A small plane flew 12 of us from Oahu to Molokai, the Hawaiian island where people with Hansen’s disease lived out their days in the 1800s. Death haunts the three-square mile Kalaupapa Peninsula. Some 8,000 people with Hansen’s disease lived and died there. Most are buried in the cemetery but some where their bodies were left. With the sea on three sides and a 2,000 foot cliff on the fourth, the flat peninsula made a perfect prison.
Today we know that 95% of us have a gene that prevents us from contracting Hansen’s disease and that medicine can cure it in weeks. In the 1800s, so many native Hawaiians contracted the disease that officials separated anyone with the slightest sign of the disease from their families and shipped them to Molokai. Doctors considered the disease contagious and untreatable.
A sturdy and steady Belgium farm boy, Father Damien De Veuster, worked for nine years on the big island of Hawaii, learned the Hawaiian language, and became a priest of the people. He volunteered to become the pastor of St. Philomena’s Church on Molokai in 1873 and served the people for 16 years until he died of leprosy at 49.
Damien, now St. Damien, helped the people who had no reason to live or care for one another to recover their human dignity.
When the King and Queen of Hawaii asked for sisters to nurse people with leprosy, Mother Marianne Cope assembled her Franciscan community in Syracuse and announced that she wanted to go to Hawaii and wasn’t afraid of any disease. Thirty-five sisters volunteered to go with her; she chose six.
The sisters traveled by train from New York to California and by boat to Honolulu, where they immediately took charge of the hospital for people who might have leprosy. When Father Damien got leprosy, Mother Marianne and another sister went to live on Molokai. They opened a house for women and girls on the peninsula.
In nursing hundreds of the sick, none of the sisters got leprosy because they washed their hands and followed sanitary procedures. Today the whole Church recognizes what people in Hawaii have long known — both Mother Marianne and Father Damien are saints. The sisters still work in Hawaii.
- How have you heard the term leper used?