This visit provoked controversy, as only Hawaii Board of Health officials were allowed to travel back and forth from the Kalawao settlement.
Kalawao residents protested that Damien should be subject to the same restrictions as they were. Damien was subsequently restricted to the Kalawao settlement, and was not allowed even to take missionary trips to other parts of Molokai island.
However, by November , after petitions from religious leaders, the Board of Health changed its position to allow physicians and missionaries to travel to and from Kalawao. Damien provided medical care as well as serving as a priest to Kalawao residents.
In his reports to the Board of Health, he outlined the poor conditions in the settlement and the need for warm clothing and for medicine. He pursued building projects and made improvements to food and water supplies. However, his interaction with the Kalawao residents was not without conflict, as Moblo argues. In , he temporarily served as administrator of the colony, but was removed at the request of the patients, who complained to the Board of Health.
In , Damien was appointed as a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Kalakaua The King for his "efforts in alleviating the distresses and mitigating the sorrows of the unfortunate".
Because few other medical staff were available, Damien insisted on continuing to care for leprosy patients even when he was exhausted and in ill health, ignoring warnings about contagion. Staff and residents of the colony who knew Damien remarked that he always seemed calm and unconcerned about the risk of contracting leprosy.
He had contracted leprosy by ; this diagnosis was confirmed by Eduard Arning, and officially verified in He had only intermittent coworkers from outside, and instead he recruited and trained coworkers from outside, and instead he recruited and trained coworkers from the lepers.
The "prayer leaders" were the members of his team ministry, and his "model parish" eventually grew to become a sign of hope. Father Damien received the highest Hawaiian decoration for his pioneering work with lepers, and his work received great publicity. He also earned a number of enemies because of his stubbornness and lack of organizational ability.
In spite of many obstacles he persisted in his work even after , when he was sure that he himself had leprosy. In one of his last letters he wrote, "My face and my hands are already decomposing, but the good Lord is calling me to keep Easter with Himself. Above his grave on Molokai his friends set a black marble cross with the inscription, "Damien de Veuster, Died a Martyr of Charity. Molokai was a colony of shame, peopled by lost souls and smashed bodies.
Medical care was minimal. Even if decent care were provided, Hawaiians distrusted the white man's medicine, preferring their own witch doctors, or kahuna. White doctors sporadically appeared at government expense. These physicians lived in terror of contagion.
One doctor examined lepers' wounds by lifting their bandages with his cane. Another left medicine on a table where lepers could collect it without touching him. Life was grotesque on Molokai. Ambrose Hutchinson, a veteran of half a century in the colony, describes an incident in the settlement's early days.
He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with a bundle, which, at first, I mistook for soiled rags. He wheeled it across the yard to a small windowless shack The man then half turned over the wheelbarrow and shook it.
The bundle instead of rags it was a human being rolled out on the floor with an agonizing groan. The fellow turned the wheelbarrow around and wheeled it away, leaving the sick man lying there helpless.
After a while the dying man raised and pushed himself in the doorway; with his body and his legs stretched out, he lay there face down. Molokai was a chamber of horrors. But the Hawaiian government which at this time was independent of the United States and headed by native royalty had not planned it that way. The Board of Health had put much thought into the leper settlement's establishment. It chose Molokai because its geography was ideal for enforcing the isolation and segregation policy.
Like other Hawaiian islands, Molokai was formed by a volcanic eruption from the ocean floor. As the fires under the crust of the earth exploded upward, Molokai rose out of the sea, a spectacular palisade reaching three to four thousand feet above the ocean. A later eruption within the high island poured hot lava into the sea. The volcanic flow piled up until it formed a shelf at the base of Molokai's high cliffs.
This peninsula sticks out into the ocean like a dirty brown furrowed tongue. There is no way to leave the peninsula except to plunge into the ocean or to climb up the huge vertical precipice surrounding the peninsula on three sides.
The Board of Health knew that the peninsula was a natural prison, for no one suffering the ravages of leprosy could possibly scale the cliffs surrounding the colony. Most of Molokai's non-leper population lived on the high plateau which embraces more than ninety percent of the island's land area. The leper colony was established at Kalawao on a part of the peninsula described above. Molokai's first lepers lived on, died on, and were buried in their mats. Authorities expected these poor people, weakened and crippled by their disease, to till the rich soil, raise cattle, and feed themselves.
At first the government provided a few miserable grass huts for shelter. Abandoned lepers perished from hunger and cold. Molokai's palisades are covered with heavy green vegetation. Great cataracts of water from the frequent rainstorms that lash Molokai, plunge down her cliffsides. At certain seasons of the year, winds carrying chill and dampness, cascade down from the mountains onto the leper colony. Huddled in their flimsy huts, the lepers suffer grievously from the cold.
Father Damien was deeply moved by leper children. He struggled to preserve them from the physical and moral corruption of Molokai. At the outset of his mission Damien aimed to restore in each leper a sense of personal worth and dignity. To show his poor battered flock the value of their lives, he had to demonstrate to them the value of their deaths.
And so he turned his attention first to the cemetery area beside his little chapel. He fenced it around to protect the graves from the pigs, dogs, and other scavengers. He constructed coffins and dug graves.
He organized the lepers into the Christian Burial Association to provide decent burial for each deceased. The organization arranged for the requiem Mass, the proper funeral ceremonies, and sponsored a musical group that played during the funeral procession. Damien continued to minister to the sick, bringing the Sacraments of confession and Holy Communion and annointing bedridden lepers. He washed their bodies, bandaged their wounds and tidied their rooms and beds.
He did all he could to make them as comfortable as possible. He encouraged lepers to help him in all his activities. With their assistance he built everything from coffins to cottages. He constructed the rectory, built a home for the lepers' children.
When the colony expanded along the peninsula to Kalaupapa, he hustled the lepers into construction of a good road between Kalawao and Kalaupapa. Under his direction, lepers blasted rocks at the Kalaupapa shoreline and opened a decent docking facility. Damien taught his people to farm, to raise animals, to play musical instruments, to sing. He watched with pride as the leper bands he organized marched up and down playing the music Hawaiians love so well.
No self-pity in this colony. Damien's cheerful disposition and desire to serve touched the lepers' hearts without patronizing or bullying them. Little by little their accomplishments restored the sense of dignity their illness threatened to destroy. Under Damien's vigorous lead, a sense of dignity and joy-and order replaced Molokai's despair and lawlessness. Neat, painted cottages, many of which the priest himself constructed, replaced the colony's miserable shacks.
He harried the government authorities. In their eyes he was "obstinate, headstrong, brusk and officious. No doubt he erred sometimes in judgement In certain periods he got along smoothly with everyone, and at times he was urgent for improvements. In some cases he made for confusion, as various government authorities would not agree with him. In all things his lepers came first.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of Damien as a single-minded fanatic. He was a human being who was quick to smile, of pleasant disposition, of open and frank countenance. No one could deny that he was a headstrong person. But no one who knew him could deny that he was a man of warm and tender heart. He quickly forgave injuries and never bore a grudge.
Charles Warren Stoddard, an American writer, first visited Molokai in , five years before Damien's arrival.
He returned in In place of the miserable huts of the colony's beginning, Stoddard now found two villages of white houses, surrounded by flower gardens and cultivated fields. Molokai boasted a decent hospital, a graveyard, and two orphanages filled with children.
But what delighted Stoddard most of all was that the men and women, instead of rotting in the slime, awaiting death, were out horseback-riding.
In , the Englishman Edward Clifford visited Damien. These poor people seemed singularly happy. Clifford asked lepers if they missed not being back home. They replied, "Oh, no!
We're well off here. The government watches over us, the superintendent is good, and we like our pastor. He builds our houses himself, he gives us tea, biscuits, sugar and clothes. He takes good care of us and doesn't let us want for anything. Damien was completely aware of the Hawaiians' childlike nature. Simple, generous, hospitable people, the Hawaiians were most attractive. They remained, however, children of Adam and could be licentious, lazy, and, at times, mean-spirited.
Damien was not blind to their defects. Ambrose Hutchinson describes the immorality that continued to plague the colony despite Damien's best efforts. Drinkers and dancers met in a remote area of the leper settlement called "the crazy pen. Hutchinson writes: "The hilarious feasters made a quick getaway from the place through the back door to escape Damien's big stick. He would not hesitate to lay it on good and hard on the poor hapless one who happened to come within reach of his cane.
His disciplinary measures did not hurt church attendance. The lepers came to St. Philomena's in such numbers that he had to enlarge the chapel. But even expanded facilities could not contain the worshipers. On Sundays, overflow crowds peered through the church windows to participate in the divine services.
Visitors never forgot the sights and sounds of a Sunday Mass at St. Philomena's Chapel. Damien, clear-eyed and devout, stood at the altar.
Strong, muscular, a picture of vitality and health, the priest's face was kind and his concern for the people evident. His lepers gathered around him on the altar.
Some were blind. They constantly coughed and expectorated. The odor was overpowering. Yet Damien never once wavered or showed his disgust. Damien placed, of all things, poor boxes in the church. Because the blind often missed the slot, the pastor placed a little bell inside the poor box.
When the sightless leper's coin had dropped safely into the box, the bell rang. Hawaiians love to sing, and St. Philomena's choir had no shortage of candidates. Because leprosy often attacked vocal cords, leper voices produced peculiar sounds. Nevertheless, the choir sang joyfully.
Damien's life was suffused with horror, yet he refused to be broken by it and refused to permit his little flock to be swept into despair. He ran foot races for the sports-loving lepers, even though some of them had no feet. He formed a band, even though some had few fingers to play the instruments.
One witness reported two organists who played at the same time, managing ten fingers between them. News of Damien's deeds spread from Hawaii to Europe to America. The priest of Molokai became front-page news. Funds poured in from all over the world. An Anglican priest, Reverend Hugh Chapman, organized, through the help of the London Times, a highly successful fund drive.
Damien's notoriety and fund-raising drew the ire of the Hawaiian government and his own religious superiors. Both accused him of playing the press for his own selfish reasons. The government was unhappy, because it felt Damien's begging gave the Hawaiian effort to combat leprosy a bad image. Walter Gibson, Prime Minister of the Hawaiian king, felt that his government was most generous toward the lepers.
It was spending fifty thousand dollars a year, which represented five percent of its total taxes, on leper care.
No other government in the world could point to such a proud health-care record. The superiors of the Sacred Hearts mission were distressed because they felt Damien was giving the Congregation's Fathers and Brothers a bad image. The press made it seem as if he were the only Sacred Hearts missionary willing to serve the colony. His superiors knew this was not true. And they took it as an affront to the whole Congregation. His superiors further accused Damien of being a "loner" because of his unhappy relationship with the three assistants they had sent him at different times.
In all fairness, it probably is true that no one else could have lived with any of the three priests. But no one was more irritated by Damien's fame than Hawaii's Yankee missionaries. Stern Puritan divines felt leprosy was the inevitable result of the Hawaiian people's licentiousness.
In their puritanical judgement the Hawaiian people were corrupt and debased. The segregation policy would have to be enforced to hasten the inevitable physical and moral collapse of the essentially rotten Hawaiian culture. There were medical doctors who were so convinced of an essential connection between leprosy and sexual immorality that they insisted that leprosy could be spread only through sexual contact. When Damien entered his prison at Molokai, he had to make a decision. He believed that the Hawaiians were basically good and not essentially corrupt.
And now he had to show them belief, regardless of the price. Thus, somewhere during the first part of his stay he made the dread decision to set aside his fear of contagion. He touched his lepers, he embraced them, he dined with them, he cleaned and bandaged their wounds and sores. He placed the host upon their battered mouths. He put his thumb on their forehead when he annointed them with the holy oil. All these actions involved touch. Touch is, of course, necessary if one is to communicate love and concern.
The Hawaiians instinctively knew this. And that is why the Hawaiians shrank from the Yankee divines. Although these Yankee religious leaders expended much money on their mission endeavors, few Hawaiians joined their churches. The islanders sensed the contempt in which the puritan minds held them.
On this altar which he constructed, Father Damien celebrated Mass each day. From the Eucharist, the priest drew strength to continue his lonely and perilous mission. After leprosy claimed him, and he entered into his "peculiar Golgotha," he found his deepest consolation and hope in the Mass. Damien was not, as we have noted, blind to the Hawaiians' very real faults. Many Hawaiians, by their irregular sexual habits, greatly contributed to the spread of leprosy.
But Damien knew that was not the only way the disease was communicated. Above all, he rejected the insufferable notion that God had laid this disease as a curse upon these people, to wipe them off the face of the earth. Damien hated leprosy. He didn't see it as a tool of a vengeful God. He saw it as a suffering that man must eliminate. God loved the leper.
0コメント