Damien de Veuster was a Belgian priest serving in Hawaii when the government was forcing people with Hansen’s disease into quarantine on the Kalaupapa Peninsula of Molokai. The bishop would not command a priest to accept what could become a death sentence. Damien volunteered, arrived in 1873, and asked to remain with the community.
He served there for sixteen years, sharing daily life rather than ministering from a safe distance. He eventually contracted the disease himself and died in 1889. The Church canonized him in 2009. Damien’s witness is not that he was unafraid. It is that the people society treated as untouchable were worth approaching, knowing, serving, and belonging to.