Saint Damien of Molokai

Jozef De Veuster was born on January 3, 1840, in Tremelo, Belgium, the son of farmers. He joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, taking the name Damien, and in 1864 went to Hawaii in place of his sick brother. He was ordained a priest in Honolulu that same year and served for nine years in rural parishes on the Big Island.

In 1873 he volunteered to go to Kalaupapa, on the island of Molokai, where the government isolated people with leprosy (Hansen's disease). He found some 600 patients living in misery and became their pastor, doctor, carpenter and gravedigger, building homes, a church, an orphanage and a water system. In 1884 he discovered that he too had the disease. He kept working until he died on April 15, 1889, at age 49. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2009.

The Church in the United States keeps his optional memorial on May 10, and Hawaii honors him with a state holiday on April 15. His statue stands in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, and the Kalaupapa peninsula remains a place of pilgrimage. Many ministries to people with HIV and leprosy take him as patron.