Father Damien was a priest who served the leper colony at Molokai in the Hawaiian islands in the 19th century. He ministered to the lepers as a missionary and tended to their physical care. After working 12 years with the lepers, he himself caught the disease and died 5 years later at the colony in 1889. On October 11, the Vatican will declare him to be a saint.
One does not have to agree with Rome’s theology of sainthood to appreciate Father Damien as one of those sublime examples of self-sacrificial love that Christianity sometimes produces and that so confound the secularists.
This is Damien, afflicted with the disease, not too long before his death:
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