The Priest Who Became a Leper

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Father Damien de Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered for what no one else would accept — ministry to the leper colony at Kalaupapa, a settlement of eight hundred exiled souls whom the world had abandoned on a remote peninsula surrounded by sea cliffs.…