05/10/2024
Saint of the Day🕊
Saint Damien de Veuster of Moloka’i🙏
When Joseph de Veuster was born in Tremelo, Belgium, in 1840, few people in Europe had any firsthand knowledge of leprosy, Hansen’s disease. By the time he died at the age of 49, people all over the world knew about this disease because of him.
Forced to quit school at age 13 to work on the family farm, Joseph entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary six years later, taking the name of a fourth-century physician and martyr. When his brother Pamphile, a priest in the same congregation, fell ill and was unable to go to the Hawaiian Islands as assigned, Damien quickly volunteered in his place. In May 1864, two months after arriving in his new mission, Damien was ordained a priest in Honolulu and assigned to the island of Hawaii.
In 1873, he went to the Hawaiian government’s l***r colony on the island of Moloka’i, set up seven years earlier. Damien volunteered to remain there permanently, caring for the people’s physical, medical, and spiritual needs.
Soon the settlement had new houses and a new church, school and orphanage. A few years later, he succeeded in getting the Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse, led by Mother Marianne Cope, to help staff this colony in Kalaupapa. Damien contracted Hansen’s disease and died of its complications.
When Hawaii became a state in 1959, it selected Damien as one of its two representatives in the Statuary Hall at the US Capitol.
Saint Anthony's Chapel, Belgium😍📍
Many people from throughout the World come to the St. Anthony’s Chapel for the crypt of Father Damien, who has been buried here since 1936. Inside the church visitors are able to follow the career of Damien through a number of panels of photos, from his vocation as a missionary to his death in 1889.
Damien was beatified in 1995 and designated the ‘Greatest Belgian of All Time’ in December 2005. He was canonised in Rome on 11 October 2009.
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