Review: St. Damien of Molokai, Apostle of the Exiled

Few of my book reviews warrant "full disclosure" right off the top, but that convention applies here, because while I am older than one of the authors of this affecting biography of Fr. Damien de Veuster, I remember Matthew Bunson positively from our high school days together in Hawaii.

Bunson has since made a name for himself in Goth, Sherlockian, and Catholic publishing circles. That unusual trifecta testifies to the range of his interests. The professor and theologian now works, I think, from Indiana, where (like Amy Welborn, whose name has currency with many readers of this blog) he writes sometimes for Our Sunday Visitor.

Rookie biographers writing about someone with the stature of Fr. Damien de Veuster might have made the mistake of delving right into his 16 years as a missionary priest among leprosy (Hansen's disease) patients on the island of Molokai, but Matthew Bunson and his mother and co-author Margaret are not rookies. They place Fr. Damien's apostolate in the context of 19th-century Christian missionary work (both Protestant and Catholic) throughout the Pacfic. They also have a keen eye for politics and personalities in the Kingdom of Hawaii at that time. These points of emphasis strengthen an already-strong story.

Fr. Damien gained renown that he never sought because, as the Bunsons note, this short-tempered Belgian priest tamed his own forceful will to the service of God. He was not the first to care for lepers in Hawaii -- set apart from other Hawaiians by a law promulgated in 1865 -- but he had a tremendous work ethic and an unflagging compassion for his parishioners. By the end of his life, "His landing on Molokai had changed the world's awareness of leprosy. It became a medical condition and not a biblical punishment." In other words, the Bunsons add, "Damien brought the light of Christ into a scene of horror, and by bearing the ravages of that affliction, he taught the modern world to recognize leprosy as a suffering, not a curse from an angry deity."

The Bunsons describe the travails of leprosy vividly, and while such paragraphs are sometimes hard to read and more gruesome than sepia-toned photos of Damien's scarred and bespectacled face under his flat-brimmed hat, they do bring home the seriousness of the disease. The same kind of vividly descriptive imagery is also used -- less effectively, I think -- in making the beginnings of a case for Fr. Damien as a mystic toward the end of his life. That Fr. Damien had more than a few "dark nights of the soul" cannot be doubted, but because by then we've grown to admire Fr. Damien as an indefatigable man who volunteered for the mission assignment in his scholarly older brother's place, then built churches and houses and 600+ coffins by hand, the shift between "practical" and "spiritual" is not always seamless (I say that knowing that "grace builds on nature," and knowing that the great Mark Twain grappled with the same problem in his too-little-known biogoraphy of Saint Joan of Arc).

I invariably find lapses of editing in the books that I read (my day job involves correcting such things), but to its credit, this biography had only two such lapses I could find: first, an unproven assertion that Fr. Damien's way of looking at people and events was "remarkably unique" (as though there were degrees of unique-ness), and second, a confused chronology with respect to one of Fr. Damien's champions, the Rev. Hugh B. Chapman.

Rev. Chapman, an Anglican clergyman, is described as having heard about Fr. Damien from various newspaper articles "such as the one that appeared in The Illustrated London Times soon after Damien's death." That would not be problematic, but for the fact that two pages later, "The Reverend Mr. Chapman first wrote to Father Damien in February 1888," and Fr. Damien was alive to receive his letter.

Those nits aside (where they belong), this biography does a yeoman job of introducing readers to a great man, while also offering penetrating insights into his associates, some of whom, like Union Army veteran-turned-missionary Brother Joseph Dutton, were heroic in their own right.

I knew a fair bit about Fr. Damien before reading the book (the Irish Christian brothers at Damien Memorial High School cared more about its namesake than the teachers at William Tecumseh Sherman School seem to care about General Sherman), but the Bunsons shed light on many things I did not know, like the fraternal support that Fr. Damien and other Sacred Hearts priests received from Fransicans in the California missions, the esteem in which Fr. Damien was held by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and President Theodore Roosevelt's salute to the memory of Fr. Damien via a "change course" order to the admiral commanding the Great White Fleet in 1908, so that the fleet sailed close enough to Molokai to be reviewed by Brother Dutton from shore.

It's no surprise that Our Sunday Visitor asked the Bunsons to revise the manuscript they'd written some years ago so that it could be republished in time to coincide with last year's canonization of Fr. Damien. The resulting biography (a shade over 200 pages, not counting appendices) is a keeper.

(My review copy of this paperback book came through the good offices of Chris Cash at The Catholic Company; the book itself was sole compensation for the review)