With his ministry to lepers, one of the most famous imitators of Christ was Father Damien.  Fr. Damien was born in Belgium in 1840, and he was ordained as a priest when he was 25 years old.  In 1873, Father Damien went to Molokai, Hawaii, as a missionary to the leper colony there.  On the island, he found 800 lepers, who were treated as little more than animals. The lepers of the island were considered to be civilization’s discards, a degraded form of humanity.

These lepers had lost all human dignity and self-worth.  They lived in unbounded debauchery and had accepted within themselves the destructive opinions of the outside prejudiced society. The lepers of the Island of Molokai were acting out the beliefs of others, who considered the lepers to be sub-human and sinful.  Over a 16-year period, Fr. Damien worked diligently to reverse this thinking.  At first, everyone resisted Fr. Damien’s efforts.  The Church resisted his efforts; the government resisted his efforts; and even the lepers, themselves, resisted the efforts of Fr. Damien!

With faith, patience, and a genuine love for the lepers, Fr. Damien was able to shepherd these shunned, abandoned, unaccepted people into an orderly community.  He expected them to demonstrate the highest ideals, and they began to live up to his expectations.  In his 11^th year on the island, Fr. Damien himself contracted leprosy, and five years later, he died.  His time in Molokai was a triumph of faith.  Fr. Damien did not cure their leprosy.  Instead, he helped cure each leper’s hatred of self and restored to each one a sense of human dignity.

Fr. Damien looked beyond the leprosy to the beauty of God’s image in the soul of each person.  He wanted these most outcast to see themselves as completely restored human beings, wonderfully created by God.