Religion

"Nailed to his bed" means stabbing pain in your lower back and legs

False

Michael James Baldwin -"Minister of Inclusiveness," his opponents called him-an Englishman, who was an enemy of the Anglican business and moral elite, and the questionable champion of the native Hawaiians.

False

More and more the old generation of New England missionaries were retiring from the field. A number of them, and a greater number of their daughters, were going into the profitable business of pineapple planting.

False

Fouesnel had not attended Damien's funeral at Kalawao (neither had Koeckemann).

True

Toward the end of 1885, Damien asked tentatively to be allowed a room at Kakaako branch hospital in Honolulu, where he could spend time when his conscience demanded confession. But the vice-provincial, Father Leonor Fouesnel, expressly forbade Damien to visit the capital.

True

Walter Murray Gibson as president of the Board of Health, the kingdom was doing everything possible in the matter of leprosy, and more.

True

"As for me, since coming to the leprosy settlement, I have confided to Saint Peter and Saint Paul the matter of my health. It is up to them to preserve me from this terrible sickness, which they have done so far."

False

"Some of my happiest times at Milolii," Anderson wrote later, "were spent in this huge deck, sketching Damien and listening to him sing his favorite Hawaiian hymns.

False

And, of course, there had been Augustinian brothers and sisters at Kalawao before Damien.

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At Saint Mary's church there were holes in its floor and buckets for those who coughed and had to spit.

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Augustine began his novitiate under the religious name Sebastion, with the Jesuits at Braine-le-Comte.

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Bishop Koeckemann remarked that he would shed no tears if the Archbishop Dunkenmire allowed Montiton to go back to his old field of work in Australia.

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Cage on his own initiative, and without consulting Dr. Jekyll, he arranged to have the letter printed verbatim in a Anglican periiodical in San Francisco.

False

Charles Maxwell, the new superintendent had an assistant, a black man Harold Hock who wrote a letter to the Board of Health.

False

Clayton Strawn bent regulations to suit himself; he was living in sin with three women at once; he was rumored to have been a bluebirder, a slave trader in the labor of Pacific islanders and Asians, and he respected Hawaiians.

False

Damien and Thomas Bertelman, also newly ordained, accompained Bishop Libermen on a little steamer. Libermen was to bless a church on the west coast of Maui.

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Damien committed himself to live and work in Kawawao settlement in 1873, at the moment when the German scientist Franz Otterheim was successfully identifying and describing the bacillus of leprosy, Bacillus leprae.

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Damien invited three Nuns to eat with him at Kalaupapa, insisting so strenuously that they did not know how to refuse. The ate under great strain, because Mother Lippermen had forbidden them to share food with the diseased.

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Damien rarely tried to describe the workings of any part of Hawaiian culture; but the practices of the kahuna, the specialist in the ancient arts of healing, he found especially boring.

False

Damien was notably excited with the attractions of the metropolis and all its great workings.

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Damien was twenty-three, the age of Christ crucified. In going to Hilo, he was making a crossing of his own between the world of the well and the world of the mortally ill, between life and death-in-life.

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Damien wrote to Abigail his favorite sister: "Where are you then, dear sister? Have you already gone away to heaven? Not so fast, please!"

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Damien wrote to Europe, in March, to a Catholic Sister who knew his family, he allowed himself to wonder whether the unresponsive Pamphile was ashamed of him for catching syphilis .

False

Damien's name was put before the state legislature of Hawaii. In just one legislative session he was confirmed to achieve the official designation of greatness, along with King Kalakaua.

False

Damien, since the arrival of Gulstan Ropert, had what he wanted more than anything else, a skilled carpenter with his own tools.

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During his ecclesiastical studies, he used to pray every day before a picture of St. Francis of Assisi, asking for intercession so that he too might be sent on a mission.

False

Dutton began sending away leaves and pieces of wood from the ironwood tree above Damien's grave as souvenirs. Eventually, the tree managed to recover and still exist today.

False

Father Leonor Fouesnel had the full support of priests, brothers and sisters who had to answer to him as vice-provisional and later provisional.

False

Father Louis-Lambert Conrardy was part Irish like Damien and a Sacred Hearts scholar.

False

Gibson ended his life a Unitarian convert; and his body was brought back to the islands for cremation.

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H.B. Cage, a Anglican cleryman, wrote "the simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man , headstrong and bigoted.

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He had chosen long ago the spot for his burial in the graveyard at Kalaupapa. The coffin bearers laid him to rest amid the two thousand other graves there, facing the altar of St. Michael, under his breadfruit tree.

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He wanted to die at Passover, so he said, to go through crucifixion, death, and resurrection with Christ.

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He was dead, forty-nine years of age, almost twenty-five years a missionary priest of the Roman Catholic Church, sixteen years pastor of a congregation of leprosy victims, and one year as a leprosy sufferer

False

Heniz Rein Vonbacker a German Catholic was selected the sculptor of Damien.

False

His one constant reference point in France was his sister. He still wrote to Phyllis, still making observations, sometimes with a little sting, about the missionary vocation.

False

Immediately the settlement flourished as lepers worked together harvesting crops and sharing their food.

False

In 1872 three Sacred Hearts brothers spent ten weeks at the settlement, putting up a church named for Our Perpetual Mother Mary.

False

In 1889, a Japanese-Hawaiian named Pohakulanimaiole committed murder, killing the husband of his lover. He was tried for the crime, convicted, and sentenced to be shot. Dr. Simon Chambers applied to the Committee of Safety for permission to "perform some inoculation experiments" on Pohakulanimaiole.

False

In 1889, the Jesuits mission at Honolulu asked Pamphile to come to Kakaako and work.

False

In 1897, after a little more than five years at Kalaupapa, Father Bertrand Trautman was given permission to go home.

False

In Damien's life time, three white Protestant ministers went to live at Kalaupapa.

False

In the Hawaiian Islands, he was sent to Kalawao settlement, a community that existed only because syphilis existed

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In the midst of all this delay, rumors began to be heard that a group of Carmelite Nuns, French women, were to be brought to the settlement.

False

It was not in him to become a true scholar: if there was an intellectual in the De Veuster family, it was Albert. Damien had not much taste for the abstract. With him, things to think about were often turned into things to do.

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It was possible, and becoming more likely every day in 1887, that the Thurston regime was a political force.

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Joseph De Veuster, fifteen years old, he renamed himself in religion, he chose to be called Damien, after an ancient mathematician-saint, one of four brothers who went among the sick and were martyred for Christ.

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Joseph Dutton in more than forty years at the settlement, he left Kalaupapa only twice, to go to North Dakota and visit his mother.

False

Joseph, admitted to the Congregation as a postulant, was an outstanding candidate for the priesthood.

False

Judge Samuel Geroffen was as much a socialist as any Protestant of his day in Honolulu; and he had come to believe that Hawaiians were not fit to govern themselves.

False

Just as there were three Protestant minister from Honolulu who volunteered to live at Kalawao, so there were also three white kokua.

False

One view was that Damien's case should wait upon these others. The martyrs of the Apostolic Lemur Confidatora had died for the faith before Damien; they should take precedence.

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Pamphile understood that if anything was to be accomplished in Damien's name, then that name must be known: divine intervention was most important.

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Reverend Albert Hamlin had the strong feeling that an Episcopalian response to the example of a life like Damien's should have broad appeal in the United States.

False

Reverend Doctor William Philpots had never been comfortable at the presence of Lutherans in the islands.

False

Reverend Hugh B. Chapman, a Lutheran himself, he wanted his charitable fund to be supported by European elite.

False

Rudolph Meyer said "I could not conceive a greater happiness or blessing if the Almighty God would reward my services by inflicting upon me this dreadful scourge of leprosy to enable me to die a Martyr.

False

Stevenson called his story "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Hawaiian Islands."

False

The Church, in the early years of Christianity, had a name for men who went out of their way to serve God in isolation. Such notable self-mortifiers were called "performers."

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The Committe of Safety Newspaper, one voice of sound, respectable haole opinion, was pleased with the decoration, the more so since Liliuokalani, not herself a Catholic, had risen in awarding it "above all petty cliques-giving honors for merit, no matter what the religious belief of the recipient may be.

False

The Episcopalians had great economic power: the power of the plantations and their revenues, the power of lucrative pineapple business paid for the running of the kingdom, including the leprosy programs of the Board of Health & Human Services.

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The Sacred Hearts Fathers were the first missionaries to the islands.

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The companion Damien wanted, so he said almost every time he raised the issue, was his cousin.

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The more Pamphile was pressed to stay, the more he wanted to go; and at last he bagan talking of leaving not only the settlement, but the Congregation: if he could not go back to Europe as a Jesuit, he would go back and become a Manchestarin, a Venetian.

False

The most imposing of patrons agreed to lend their names for Damien's statue: the Archbishop of Luxenborg: Cardinal Spanos Montero; and Baroness Flourinese of Scotland.

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The photograph showed him standing, crucifix held to his heart, closely imitating the attitude of St. Francis of Assisi.

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This was a problem: Damien, as a member of the Congregation of Saint Benedictine Monks, was under a vow of obedience to his religious superiors.

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Three of the De Veuster children before him, all boys chose to give their lives to the Church.

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Thurston kept writing letters and the letters kept getting into print. Protesting to the last, he left Kalaupapa and the islands late in 1895.

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When Damien's successors reflected on what his life must have been like, they marveled not so much at his ability to handle leprosy as at his ability in gaining the respect of all Hawaiians including royalty and the Mormons.

False

When Liliuokalani returned to Hilo, she had documents prepared in the name of her brother the king, making Damien a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Kamehameha.

False

Within the mission, there was a strong wish to be disembarrassed of the man Damien had chosen as his companion in his last months, the stranger-priest Michael-Sean O'Learie, and to have a member of the Congregation take his place.

False

"And if (continued the "respectful" suggestion) a noble Christian priest, preacher or sister should be inspired to go and sacrifice a life to console these poor wretches, that would be a royal soul to shine forever on a throne reared by human love."

True

"It is good that they (Damien and Burgerman) should be separated, each one doing his own job," wrote the provincial. "Otherwise they would never get on. I do not think it wise to put one in charge of the other."

True

"Sometimes indiscreet zeal leads him to say, to write, and even to do things which ecclesiastical authority can only criticize; as in marrying men or women who in leaving for the leprosy settlement have left the other party behind," wrote Father Leonor Fouesnel, the new vice-provincial of the mission at Honolulu.

True

A favorite reading of Damien "Saint John the Cross always prayed: "Lord, may I be scorned for love of You!" Let us make frequent meditations on the scorn which Christ suffered before Pilate-face covered with spittle-the crown of thorns-the reed-the cloak of scarlet-Barabbas is preferred.

True

Alive, he still needed a confessor. Father Columban Beissel could come to see him once every few months, but Damien needed a colleague who would live at the settlement.

True

Among all the world's leprosy victims, Damien was uniquely the Leper of all the world

True

An oddity, of whatever significance, was that Hawaiians at Kalawao rarely if ever chose to kill themselves: two only in the thirty-five years of the settlement's existence up to 1900.

True

And since Walter Murray Gibson was the unsteady political regime which might suffer, he opposed any visit by Damien. Father Leonor Fouesnel wrote again to Damien forbidding him to come to Honolulu.

True

And, of course, the ma'i Paki ship and all other ships that connected the islands with the outside world were owned by white men. That is to say, leprosy was the white man's fault.

True

Andre Burgerman never did what was finally necessary: accommodate himself both to Damien and to his superiors in the Congregation. So he had to go; and now that he was gone, Damien was alone again at Kalawao.

True

Another finding which emerged from twentieth-century research was that leprosy was not highly contagious.

True

At another time, two boys played the organ together, four-handed, but still not much more than ten-fingered.

True

Bishop Maigret and the provincial, Father Favens, decided that he (Burgerman) should not work in Kalawao leprosy sttlement itself, but instead serve the rest of Molokai. Their argument was that no matter where Burgerman was on the island, his presence would lighten Damien's load.

True

But a true Saint of the Church-no. Koeckemann would never concede Damien this kind of sanctity. No matter how admirable his self-sacrifice might have been, his faults were too grievous.

True

Certainly by the time G.W. Woods saw Damien in 1876 Damien was eating poi from the common calabash, sharing his pipe with Hawaiians, dressing sores confidently, and playing unselfconsciously with diseased children.

True

Clifford himself, a Protestant prepared to set out cogent arguments agains Catholicism as a faith, proposed to admire Damien unreservedly, so he said, announcing to his readers that "what follows afterwards will be unmixed praise of a Roman Catholic saint."

True

Clifford's finished portrait of the priest, a gentle one, showed him in profile, wearing a straw hat and wire-rimmed glasses, head inclined, the disease suggested rather than clinically rendered, a man homely to look at rather than horrible.

True

Damien "As an antidote to counteract the bad smell I got myself accustomed to the use of tobacco whereupon the smell of the pipe preserved me somewhat from carrying in my clothes the obnoxious odor of our lepers."

True

Damien asked for them-as always, but now with ultimately pressing urgency-to be sent quickly; and Fouesnel complained that Damien was again dipping his pen in acid.

True

Damien asked the father-general of the Sacred Hearts, the highest authority in the Congregation, bypassing his superior at Louvain and writing directly to Rue Picpus in Paris.

True

Damien believed himself to be-or so he told Pamphile-"the happiest missionary in the world."

True

Damien came to the Hawaiian Islands in 1864; Kalawao settlement was founded a five years later.

True

Damien did not write letters specifically for publication; and in his early years at Kalawao he always professed surprise, even amazement, to find that his private correspondences had been given to editors to print.

True

Damien had a part in laying of water pipes, the construction of a new road, the blasting of rocks at the landing place to make better access for boats. If huts were blown down by the high winds of winter, he rebuilt them. He also made coffins and dug graves.

True

Damien insisted on sleeping on the floor as usual, on a straw mattress with a single blanket and wearing only an old shirt.

True

Damien made his decision to touch without reserve the people of Kalawao, his family in Christ.

True

Damien told Rudolph Meyer that if Burgerman was appointed superintendent he (Damien) would withdraw all his help from the settlement.

True

Damien told the bishop that he hoped Montiton would not be allowed to leave so easily. His argument was urgent: a confessor was necessary to him; separation from Montiton would cause him great pain.

True

Damien took no precautions whatever. In the kindness of his nature, he never forbade lepers entering his house; they had access to it any time, night or day.

True

Damien was a haphazard housekeeper as he once remarked to Pamphile with a kind of perverse pride; and he was a haphazard groomer of himself, not the sort of man to make a ritual of washing his hands before he ate.

True

Damien was able to write to others that he voluntarily accepted before hand, and he hoped that, helped by the prayers of many, our Lord will grant me the necessary graces-to carry my cross-behind him on our peculiar Golgota of Kalawao.

True

Damien was being portrayed as a figure of unmatchable heroic self-sacrifice.

True

Damien was known to invade the dance house, hefting the walking stick he carried, to break up the dances, scattering the performers and overturning the drinking calabashes.

True

Damien's superiors, criticizing his "independence," used to say that he had no friends in the Congregation.

True

Diaminodiphenylsulpone, shortened to Dapsone, DDS treatment had, in substance, brought to an end the era of the traditional religious heroes-the saints-of leprosy.

True

Dr. Arning and Dr. Mouritz examined Damien thoroughly at the hospital dispensary, for leprosy, as well as for any "evidence of other diseases." It meant that, however Damien had contracted leprosy, it had not been by first contracting syphilis.

True

Dr. Arthur Moritz said "I have never seen any other priest, doctor, or other contact assume the same careless and indifferent attitude towards infection wth leprosy as Damien.

True

Dr. Nathaniel Emerson wanted Andre Burgerman and Damien restricted from practicing amateur medicine.

True

Father Albert Montiton would not stay at the settlement for Damien or anyone else. He did not take kindly to Damien's petition to the bishop to keep him at the settlement.

True

Father Clement Evrard had the double district of Kohala-Hamakua, a quater of the whole island. He was not strong as Damien. He and Damien discussed exchanging posts, if their superiors would allow it.

True

Father Gregoire Archambaux a Sacred Hearts Father was diagnosed as having leprosy at the same time as Damien, by the same doctors, and was all but broken by the news.

True

Father Limburg, admired the dead priest's self-sacrifice, but who could see nothing extraordinary in his personal life.

True

Fouesnel and Koeckemann had done their best to damp down enthusiasm for Damien after his death. Gulstan Ropert, did not believe there was a case for Damien's beatification.

True

He was also a considerable builder of chapels. In the months he was in Puna, he and his Hawaiian helpers put up four small buildings where Mass could be said.

True

He was baptized Joseph, youngest son and seventh of the eight children of Frans and Anne-Catherine De Veuster, small farmers at Tremeloo, a village near the provincial city of Louvain in Belgium.

True

He was confident enough of this to use God to threaten his parents (and particularly his father, who wanted him for the farm) if they should attempt to hold him back.

True

He would take his weekly night watch of adoration before the altar at the inconvenient hour of two or three in the morning. At mealtime, he chose to eat at the second sitting, when food tended to be short; and he gave up his share of meat to others uncomplainingly.

True

His mother discovered that he was putting a hard board in his bed each night, refusing himself the indulgence of comfortable sleep, practicing a silent mortification of the flesh.

True

Hyde could never have made a sacrifice that matched Damien's.

True

Hyde was one of the moral diagnosticians of leprosy. He could not believe that a dirty man (like Damien) could ever be a saint.

True

If Damien himself had never written a word, Chapman would still have been able to raise a great deal of charity money for him-thus embarrassing Gibson, and in turn embarrassing Koechemann and Fouesnel.

True

In 1844 Dr. Mouritz described Damien "he was active and vigorous, of good physique, upright in his carriage, he measured five feet eight inches in height, and weighed 204 pounds.

True

In 1870 Damien fell ill, for the first time in the islands, with a fever that reduced him, as he said to skin and bone. He recovered well, to his healthy weight of 175 pounds and to his former strength.

True

In 1936, the Belgium government requested that Damien's remains be exhumed at Kalawao for reburial in Louvain.

True

In September 1881, Liliuokalani sister of reigning Hawaiian monarch, Kalakaua, visited Kalawao.

True

In mid-November the Board of Health permitted ministers of religion to be admitted to the settlement for the exercise of the functions of their office.

True

Ira Barnes Dutton wrote no letter, but simply appeared in Honolulu one day in late June 1886, and asked Walter Murray Gibson to be allowed to go to work at Kalawao.

True

It was hard for Damien's superiors to acknowledge any exceptional merit in him; and they kept finding reasons for not forwarding the cause of his beatification.

True

It was the same with White Protestantant minister who visited Kalawao occasionally in the early days, concerned to cure the leprosy of the soul. He preached from the elevated distance and safety of a veranda: he would not touch the objects of his concern.

True

Kalakaua's sister Liliuokalani, having arranged for Damien to be decorated after her visit to Kalawao in 1881, went to the settlement again in 1884 with the king's wife, Queen Kapiolani.

True

Leprosy was resisting the best efforts of science, which meant that one of the oldest known human diseases, and the one universally reagarded as the most frightful, remained essentially unpreventable and incurable.

True

Monsignor Louis Maigret successor was Bishop Hermann Koeckemann.

True

Monsignor Louis Maigret, his bishop at Honolulu, might well have preferred an already-ordained priest.

True

Mycobacterium leprae was not aggressive. For most purposes, simple, careful personal hygiene would suffice to ward it off.

True

Not until the time of Bishop Stephen Alencastre, in the 1930s, did the movement in Honolulu gain strength and become formalized.

True

On Sunday, Sinnett heard him say that there were two figures with him constantly, one at the head and one at the foot of his bed. They were not visible to Sinnett; and Damien never named them.

True

Once again, this new embarrassment could have been avoided if the bishop and the provincial had placed a man of their choice at Kalawao in advance of Conrardy.

True

One of the white men at the settlement, William Williamson, had been a helper at the receiving hospital in Honolulu, until he had caught leprosy himself; and he taught Damien how to clean and bandage sores, and how to apply ointments and prescribe pills.

True

Ordinary conversation with someone other than a Hawaiian, and confession, made to a fellow member of his Congregation-these were essential to the renewal of the spirit.

True

Pamphile was a quiet, retiring man, a considerable linguist and scholar, but by no stretch of the imagination a rough-and-ready worker in the field like his late brother.

True

Pamphile was never going to come to the islands, then, said Damien, he should at least be a missionary "in his heart," preparing novices who would have the character required: intrepid, self-reliant, self-sacrificing.

True

Some Hawaiians apparently preferred Andre Burgerman's doctoring to Damien's attentions.

True

Stevenson put on paper a six-thousand-word response, he had it printed at his own expense in Sydney as an Open Letter; and then sent off copies to Honolulu, and others to Scotland and England, for reprinting in the press.

True

Stevenson saw in Hyde (and by extension in his fellow Protestants) a double failure of charity.

True

The Board of Health generally got 10% of government revenues, and devoted between one-half and two-thirds of its appropriation to leprosy. This kind of allocation 5% or more of a nation's resources to treat a single disease had no equal in the world.

True

The Hawaiians sang for Clifford: a "lepers' hymn," and, because it was Christmas, "Adeste Fideles."

True

The Protestants of Honolulu could hardly have been happpy at the ravishment of the public by the self-sacrifice of a Catholic priest. They were embarrassed by it; and yet they could see no clear way to redeem their embarrassment.

True

The feast day of St. Joseph, after whom Damien's parents had named him at his birth, fell on March 19.

True

The first shipload of confirmed leprosy victims waded ashore through the surf on January 6, 1866.

True

The first written constitution of the Hawaiian kingdom, published in 1840, contained a clause on religious toleration.

True

The leadership of the Sacred Hearts had decided by this time to propose some other candidates for beatification: the founder of the order, and several priests who had been put to death during the political upheavals of the period of the Commune in Paris in 1871.

True

The members of the order he had chosen to join, the Sacred Hearts, were known familiarly as the Picpus Fathers. They were priests who treated the sores of the sick: Picpus, prick-pus.

True

The mother, Anne-Catherine, was more devout, more intimately involved in religion; Joseph took homely instruction in holiness from her.

True

The native healer's use of medicinal herbs was as sound as that on any Western doctor of Damien's day.

True

The question was to what degree Damien himself was responsible: to what extent he brought his fate upon himself, not alone by going to Kalawao, but by what he did with himself there.

True

The signs of leprosy were unmistakeable: he had seen them many times among the sick that they had become initmately familiar in their sequence and in their meaning, like the Stations of the Cross.

True

The two priests could do no more than shout at each other from a distance; and so Damien had to make his confession from his bobbing boat, at the top of his voice, in French, receiving a loud absolution from his confessor over the ship's rail.

True

To go, especially so soon after arriving with a certain amount of fanfare, would be to abandon Damien and it would shame the work of the Sacred Hearts Fathers in public.

True

To have some conversation with the Franciscan Sisters was certainly one thing Damien had in mind. He wanted to try to convince their mother superior, Marianne Kopp, to send a contingent to the settlement.

True

Wherever Damien was, he could depend on hospitality-any traveler could. The Hawaiians were more than generous with what little they had.

True

Whoever (including Charles Warren Stoddard) saw a Sunday service at St. Philomena's was impressed by the fervor of the prayers and the beauty of the voices of Hawaiians singing.

True

William P. Ragsdale died and the man picked to succeed the Governor as resident superintendent was his contentious colleague Father Andre Burgerman.

True

Writing to Pamphile, he used French, the language of the Congregation. In a letter to his parents, he used Flemish, the language of his first family, of his childhood.

True