Father Damien's Pronoun

In 1873, a Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster stepped off a boat onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii, and into a colony of eight hundred people whom the world had discarded. The leper settlement at Kalaupapa was a place of enforced exile — the sick sent there to die, forgotten by society and often by the church.

For years, Father Damien preached, bandaged wounds, built coffins, and dug graves. He constructed houses and a chapel with his own hands. He sat with the dying when no one else would enter the room. But those who knew him noticed something about his Sunday sermons. He always addressed the congregation as "you who are afflicted."

Then one morning in 1885, he began his homily differently. He opened with two words that changed everything: "We lepers."

The disease had entered his own body. And rather than retreat, Damien leaned closer. He had already shared their bread and their suffering. Now he shared their condition. He did not hide himself from his own flesh.