May 10 is the feast of St. Damien de Veuster (1840-1889), the Belgian priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary who gave his life to the lepers of Molokai. Born at Tremelo, in Belgium, he entered the congregation in 1860 and was sent to the missions of Hawaii in 1864. In 1873 he volunteered to go to the leper colony of Kalaupapa, on the island of Molokai, where the Hawaiian kingdom had confined its lepers.
Damien lived among the lepers for sixteen years, building houses, churches, and coffins, dressing wounds, hearing confessions, and burying the dead. He contracted leprosy himself in 1884, and continued to serve until his death on April 15, 1889. He was beatified in 1995 and canonized in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI. His body was translated from Molokai to Louvain in 1936, where it lies in the crypt of the church of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts at Leuven.
Damien is the patron of lepers and of those who care for the isolated. From Tremelo, where he was born, to Kalaupapa, where he served and died, to Leuven, where his body lies, the May 10 feast is the feast of the priest who made himself a leper for the lepers.
