By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
The Vatican has approved the U.S. bishops' request to add of Blessed Damien of Molokai to the American church calendar. However, it changed the date customarily used in Hawaii to celebrate his feast, the date initially requested by the U.S. bishops.
The new feastday of Blessed Damien is April 15. It has the rank of "optional memorial" which means it may by chosen as the feast celebrated at Mass for that day. April 15 this year falls in the Saturday before Palm Sunday.
April 15 is the day of Blessed Damien's death, the Vatican's traditional day of choice when designating the feast of a person beatified or canonized. Hawaii had celebrated May 10, the day Damien set foot on Molokai, as Damien's feast day because it was liturgically a more convenient, not falling in the Lenten season as the April date does.
Blessed Damien is the 19th-century Belgian missionary, Sacred Hearts Father Damien Joseph de Veuster, who served the leprosy patients on the island of Molokai, Hawaii. After 14 years of ministry he eventually contracted Hansen's disease himself and died of it in 1889. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995.
Last fall the U.S. bishops voted to add his feast day to the U.S. calendar. The Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments confirmed the decision in a letter dated Dec. 20. Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb of Mobile, Ala., chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Liturgy, communicated the Vatican approval to the U.S. bishops in a memo sent out Feb. 18.
The opening prayer for the Mass for the feast of Blessed Damien is as follows:
Father of mercy,
in Blessed Damien
you have given a shining witness of love
for the poorest and most abandoned.
Grant that, by his intercession,
as faithful witness of the heart of your Son Jesus,
we too may be servants of the most needy and rejected.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
One God, for ever and ever.