The Priest Who Said "We

Father Damien de Veuster arrived on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in May 1873, stepping onto a shore most people fled from. The settlement at Kalaupapa was a leper colony — a place where the Kingdom of Hawaii sent those deemed too diseased, too dangerous, too broken for ordinary life. No one came here voluntarily. But Damien did. The thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest built homes, dug graves, bandaged wounds that others refused to touch.…