As you fly into Kalaupapa, the most prominent building you see is St. Francis Catholic Church standing proudly in the center of the settlement. The heart of Hawaii’s smallest parish with the largest reputation will celebrate its 100th anniversary on May 10, Blessed Damien’s feast day, with a morning Mass and reception.

Bishop Larry Silva will preside at the centennial liturgy. Charter plane-loads of members of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts and the Sisters of St. Francis and others will join the Kalaupapa parishioners for the commemoration.

Kalaupapa is the location of the community of Hansen’s disease patients served by Blessed Damien and Blessed Marianne and the members of their two religious communities who followed them.

St. Francis Church was built on the sunny side of the peninsula after Damien’s death, and named after the patron of Blessed Marianne’s order of nuns.

Sacred Hearts Father Felix Vandebroek is its present pastor.

St. Francis is not to be confused with St. Philomena’s, “Damien’s Church,” which stands in the company of gravestones in the now deserted area of Kalawao about a 15-minute drive from Kalaupapa town.

Sacred Hearts Father Wendelin Moellers built the original St. Francis Church in 1899. He designed it in wood to look like a medieval cathedral with three large entrance doors. A fire destroyed the church in 1906 and Father Maxime Andre rebuilt it in stone, Gothic-style, in 1907.

By the late 1990s, the church, which can hold about 100 worshipers, had fallen into a sorry state of disrepair. The stained glass windows were falling apart and were being propped up with rocks and held together with bits of tape.

The pastor at the time, Sacred Hearts Father Joseph Hendriks, decided to fix his church. But with a parish population of 35 patients, and a handful of healthcare, state and federal park workers, the priest had to find his money elsewhere.

His personal appeals soon spread across Hawaii and around the world and in four years he had collected more than $200,000 for his project.

The choir loft was restored, the doors refurbished, the plaster fixed, the arched window frames repaired and the pews re-varnished. The birds were evicted from the bell tower along with three truckloads of nests. The stained glass was repaired at a cost of about $8,000 per window.

The church had no bell. The original one had cracked many years before. So Father Gary Colton, then pastor of Holy Rosary Parish in Paia, Maui, donated one of his church’s two bells.