When Father Damien Said "We

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien de Veuster stepped off a boat onto Molokai, a Hawaiian island that had become a colony of exile for people suffering from leprosy. The government had quarantined hundreds there to die — abandoned, forgotten, without doctors, priests, or hope. Damien chose to go. For eleven years he lived among them — building churches, digging graves, dressing wounds, learning their names.…