Father Damien

Jozef De Veuster was the seventh child of a Flemish farming family and was meant to take over the farm. Instead he followed his brother into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, taking the name Damien, and in 1864 went to Hawaii in his brother's place when the brother fell ill. He was ordained in Honolulu and spent nine years as a rural priest, building chapels with his own hands.

The kingdom of Hawaii had begun deporting people with leprosy to the Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai, a strip of land cut off by sea cliffs, where they were left with minimal supplies and no law. In 1873 the bishop asked for volunteers to serve there in rotation. Damien went first and asked to stay.

He found some eight hundred people in shacks, many dying, the dead buried in shallow graves that pigs and dogs dug up. He built a proper cemetery, then houses, a water system, an orphanage and a church. He dressed sores, made coffins and dug graves, and ate from the same dishes as his parishioners against every rule of the day. He was headstrong and quarrelled with his superiors and with the health board, who found him hard to manage.

Around 1884 he noticed he could not feel hot water on his foot. He began his next sermon with the words "we lepers". He kept working for five more years and died in April 1889, aged 49. An attack on his character by a Honolulu clergyman prompted a furious defence by Robert Louis Stevenson. He was declared a saint in 2009.