The Priest Who Touched the Untouchable

In 1873, a young Belgian priest named Father Damien de Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii — a place the world had abandoned. The Hawaiian government had banished over a thousand leprosy patients to the Kalaupapa peninsula, a remote settlement ringed by sea cliffs, where the sick were left to suffer and die without medical care, without dignity, without hope.…