Father Damien of Molokai and Mother Marianne of Molokai, were natives of Belgium and Germany respectively, but are best known for their care of lepers (sufferers of Hansen’s disease) of the Kalaupapa Colony. In 1866 Hawaii established a leper colony on the Island of Molokai, where approximately 8,000 Hawaiian were quarantined between its nineteenth century founding and 1969 closure. Father Damien, a priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, answered the call to serve the spiritual and medical needs of the people of Kalaupapa, improving quality of life by building houses and roads, creating a parish, and ministering sacraments. Father Damien’s respect for the innate dignity of each person was evident in how he lived, worked, ate, prayed, and suffered with the lepers – people who were feared, reviled and literally cast out of society. Damien of Molokai was championed by a great number of protestants during his lifetime, cited as a source of inspiration by Gandhi, and is recognized by Catholics as one of two saints who lived out their service to Christ at the Kalaupapa Colony.
Mother Marianne is known to have said “The charity of the good knows no creed and is confined to no one place”, a belief manifest in her early work in New York State where she taught immigrant children, and helped found hospitals with innovative attention to cleanliness and care for those pushed to the margins of society including addicts and those who could not pay for treatment; and in the work by which the world knows her: answering the plea of Hawaiian King Kalalaua to help care for Hawaii’s lepers.