Books in Brief: Holy Man

Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai, by Gavan Daws (Harper, 304 pp., $8.95). This is the first adequate account by an independent scholar about Joseph de Veuster, whose beatification is being considered by the Holy See. As a farm boy in Belgium, he would forgo sleep in order to nurse a sick cow for a widow neighbor. Enrolled in the Congregation of the Sacred Heart, he studied at Louvain and Paris. Prior to ordination, he was posted to Hawaii. Touched by the “awful spiritual and physical misery” of lepers, he volunteered a ministry to “the most abandoned of mankind.” He tried to be a medico as well as a priest. Certainly, he labored with competence as a carpenter, mason, kitchen gardener, livestock raiser, gravedigger, and tireless provider for orphans, incurables, and the poor, regardless of religious affiliation. Such an apostolate indicated the aptness of his name in religion, inspired as he was by Damien, an early Christian physician-martyr. Damien’s martyrdom was leprosy. World renown ensued when a Reverend Dr. Charles McEwen Hyde claimed that the missionary’s disease was the result of sexual intercourse. Whereupon Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a rebuttal whose echoes resound in the twentieth century. But Gavan Daws succeeds in a role that was impossible for Stevenson. The author not only examines the clinical evidence in the case, but also shows that the accusation was based upon a nolle-prossed charge against an entirely different priest whose name was Fabien, not Damien. Daws adds, however, that Damien impressed neither his colleagues nor his superiors as a saint. Undeniably, he was “stubborn, coarse, unmindful of hygiene” and, on occasion, forgetful of canon law. Nevertheless, wherever he worked, he attracted attention; excited sympathy; stirred up the press. Among his most generous benefactors were clergymen and communicants of the Church of England. In their eyes and those of Brother Joseph Dutton, his most devoted co-worker, the faults, failures, and shortcomings were all “consumed like straws in the fire of Damien’s charity.”

J. F. thorning

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J. F. Thorning

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Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai, by Gavan Daws (Harper, 304 pp., $8.95). This is the first adequate account by an independent scholar about Joseph de Veuster, whose beatification is being considered by the Holy See. As a farm boy in Belgium, he would forgo sleep in order to nurse a sick cow for a widow neighbor. Enrolled in the Congregation of the Sacred Heart, he studied at Louvain and Paris. Prior to ordination, he was posted to Hawaii. Touched by the “awful spiritual and physical misery” of lepers, he volunteered a ministry to “the most abandoned of mankind.” He tried to be a medico as well as a priest. Certainly, he labored with competence as a carpenter, mason, kitchen gardener, livestock raiser, gravedigger, and tireless provider for orphans, incurables, and the poor, regardless of religious affiliation. Such an apostolate indicated the aptness of his name in religion, inspired as he was by Damien, an early Christian physician-martyr. Damien’s martyrdom was leprosy. World renown ensued when a Reverend Dr. Charles McEwen Hyde claimed that the missionary’s disease was the result of sexual intercourse. Whereupon Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a rebuttal whose echoes resound in the twentieth century. But Gavan Daws succeeds in a role that was impossible for Stevenson. The author not only examines the clinical evidence in the case, but also shows that the accusation was based upon a nolle-prossed charge against an entirely different priest whose name was Fabien, not Damien. Daws adds, however, that Damien impressed neither his colleagues nor his superiors as a saint. Undeniably, he was “stubborn, coarse, unmindful of hygiene” and, on occasion, forgetful of canon law. Nevertheless, wherever he worked, he attracted attention; excited sympathy; stirred up the press. Among his most generous benefactors were clergymen and communicants of the Church of England. In their eyes and those of Brother Joseph Dutton, his most devoted co-worker, the faults, failures, and shortcomings were all “consumed like straws in the fire of Damien’s charity.”

J. F. thorning