The three-mile walk down the side of a Molokai mountain into the lepers' settlement isn't your typical Hawaiian excursion.
The settlement, on the Kalaupapa peninsula surrounded by roiling surf and 2,000-foot-tall cliffs, feels both holy and haunted. It's where Father Damien de Veuster, a Catholic priest from Tremeloo, Belgium, went to embrace people who had been banished from the rest of the world.
Damien, as he's known on the island, was 33 when he arrived at Kalaupapa in May 1873. For 16 years he engaged in hands-on care for the afflicted, until his death from leprosy at age 49. The story of Damien and the lepers is told on a four-hour tour of the Kalaupapa National Historic Park — a place of wild contrasts: Tropical grasses grow near a stone Celtic cross. Primeval mountains used as the set for one of Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" movies rise behind a ramshackle bar, a store and other buildings left over from the days when hundreds of lepers lived here.
When Damien first came to the peninsula, he had "nothing but a breviary in his hand and no roof over his head," wrote Gavan Daws in his biography, "Holy Man." The priest was "living in the open for some weeks and eating his meals off a flat rock and sleeping under a pu hala, a pandanus tree."
"Other priests making brief visits," to the 600 leprosy sufferers living in the village of Kalawao "were reduced . . . to speechlessness or weeping incoherence," Daws continues.
Hearing Damien's story today, visitors to Kalawao are quiet.
"This place is peaceful, isn't it?" asks Father Joseph Hendricks, one of the elderly members of the community. Like Damien, he is a Belgian member of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart. He was inspired to enter the order when he was a teenager, when Damien's relics were brought back to Belgium in 1936.
But Hendricks' Molokai is nothing like his predecessor's. Antibiotics treat leprosy, enabling patients to live in the general population. Only a few patients still make their homes on the Kalaupapa peninsula; all are past 60.
Each year a few thousand visitors make their way down the 26-switchback trail to see the settlement. They come from across the American and European continents, to this place "set apart"; they walk into the church where Damien celebrated Mass and across the deep-green plateau where lepers were deposited by boats from Honolulu.
Damien has been beatified but not canonized by the Vatican and is known to some as the "martyr of Molokai." Historical accounts call him charismatic but unable to get along with many Catholic and Hawaii Board of Health officials.
Yet he continues to inspire and astonish people, even tour guides such as Patrick Boland. The St. Paul, Minn., native first came to Molokai while studying for his degree in public health. "I walked down the trail," he remembers, "and I met Richard Marks," a patient who now runs the Damien Tours company.
"I spent the night. He gave me a book to read while I was waiting for the morning. I didn't finish the book," so after Boland went back topside — to the part of Molokai above the Kalaupapa peninsula — he had to find that book again. Then "I just started reading and studying. I find the place enthralling."
On his tour, Boland shows small groups St. Philomena's, the main place of worship during Damien's time. Visitors also see Kalaupapa's modern LDS and Protestant chapels; they do not usually see the patients who choose to live at the settlement. Perhaps the most ethereal place on the tour is the graveyard where Damien prayed.
The priest's daily commitment set him apart, Boland said. "It's like a spouse caring for an ill wife or husband. You get up every morning and say, 'What do I need to do?' and 'Will I be able to do it?' You can imagine Damien, waking up here every morning, with the smell," and getting on with his work, much of the time with no one helping him.
"Being thrown to the lions is easy" by comparison, Boland said. "That's a one-time, five-minute decision. Taking care of the people, dressing the wounds," physical and spiritual, each day for 16 years: "That's more heroic."
Damien offered his people the sacraments of Communion, confession and last rites. He didn't baptize many babies, though, because newborns were taken away from their mothers and sent to Honolulu. Babies born to lepers don't have the disease; hence many were adopted by other relatives. But a large number of children, taken from mothers living at Kalaupapa, were sent to orphanages.
In later years, pregnant women were brought from Kalaupapa to Honolulu. They gave birth there and were immediately forced to give up their babies for adoption. The new mothers then returned alone to the leprosy settlement.
A feeling of sadness lingers, 113 years after Damien died here. Boland points out the site of the old visitors' quarters, where a chain-link fence separated patients from loved ones who had traveled to Kalaupapa. "There was no touching. But at least you could see your husband or your wife" at the settlement.
Damien caught the disease because "he was immersed in it," Boland said. "He couldn't have any barriers between him and his people. And there was poor sanitation and little (fresh) water."
Boats from Honolulu deposited a total of 8,000 people on Kalaupapa's rocky coast during Damien's time there. At its peak the population of lepers was about 1,100. "Every year, about 200 died and about 200 more were sent over," Boland said. Damien needed help, and Catholic diocesan leaders searched the American continent for a religious order that could send workers to Molokai. Eventually they found the Sisters of Charity in Syracuse, N.Y., and Mother Marianne Cope.
"She was going to come up and establish her community, and go back" to Syracuse, said Boland. "She never went back. She came up in 1888 and stayed until she died in 1918." Apparently that was Mother Marianne's choice; both she and Damien were offered passage back through Honolulu.
The Sisters of Charity "have the sainthood cause going, for her," Boland said. "They are very well-organized. They know what they're doing, and it's on track."
As for Damien, Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1995, moving Blessed Damien a step nearer to sainthood. But Boland said that seven years later, there's little movement at the Vatican toward canonization.
Another Catholic worker, Brother Joseph Dutton, made his way to Molokai in the mid-1880s. In 44 years at the settlement, he left the Kalawao village only three times and then he went only as far as Kalaupapa, according to Daws' book. Damien built Dutton a house near St. Philomena's Church and the cemetery.
"The principal graveyard back of my cabin," Dutton wrote in 1887, "has about 2,000 graves, and nearly 1,000 are buried elsewhere . . . take it all in all, this is a fine locality for meditation, surrounded by the best symbol of eternity, the boundless ocean."
E-mail: durbani@desnews.com