By Lisa Dahm

Two years ago, the Hawaii male Catholic fashion “must have” was the stylish Reyn Spooner Blessed Damien aloha shirt, with print designed by Big Island artist Dietrich Varez. More than 1,000 of the limited edition reverse-print creations depicting the missionary priest caring for Molokai’s Hansen’s disease patients flew off the shelves and onto the backs of men to become staple Sunday Mass attire.

Despite the shirt’s solemn subject, it was a popular item, said Kirk Hubbard, chief operating officer for the island apparel making company. People were requesting it, even after it was sold out. Many shirts were even sold on the mainland.

In the meantime, another Hawaii missionary gained beatified status — Mother Marianne Cope.

Time for a new shirt.

With the first design so successful, Reyn Spooner re-commissioned the longtime Volcano resident block print artist to create a second design — this time incorporating both Blessed Damien and Blessed Marianne.

“The first shirt was strictly about the story of Father Damien,” Hubbard said.

With the famed Franciscan Sister’s beatification in 2005, “the full story of Kalaupapa came out,” he said. “There was a little more updated story to tell.”

The story is told in four images — Blessed Damien giving a person with leprosy a drink of water, Blessed Marianne offering someone a fish to eat, Damien sawing lumber to build a church and Marianne reading to a group of children.

Birds surrounding the nun signify her Franciscan order’s respect of nature. Easter lilies, representing redemption, border the depictions. Varez also included images of the hibiscus, the state flower, and palm trees.

“It was really easy because Dietrich Varez is extremely inspired by the subject,” Hubbard said. “By just mentioning it to him, he was already at home base as to what the design should look like— what should be presented. That made it better.”

Varez said that he researched the life and work of Mother Marianne in addition to his ongoing study of Father Damien to create the designs. Both have been subjects of several of his block prints long before the shirt commissions.

“I enjoyed doing this because the response has been so incredible,” Varez said.

Not a Catholic himself, the artist said he was “adopted” in the islands by “Portuguese and Catholics.”

“It is just wonderful,” he said.

Varez sent a shirt to Bishop Larry Silva from his own advance stock.

“Bishop Silva told me how much he liked it,” Varez said. “That is very flattering — that kind of feedback keeps a person going.”

Large framed Varez prints of Blessed Marianne and Blessed Damien hang on the wall of the Bishop’s downtown office.

Also a painter, Varez has already completed a three-by four-foot painting of Damien and is now working on a similar one of Mother Marianne.

“I am a Lutheran, but I see them very much a part of what Hawaii was and still is,” he said. “These are very important people.”

He credits much of his inspiration for Blesseds Damien and Marianne to Sacred Hearts Sister Mary Dolorine Pires, who he said “circulates” his work depicting the two candidates for sainthood.

Sister Mary Dolorine is a Maui-born, Honolulu-based scholar and teacher.

“Without her, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere towards this whole thing because I live in an isolated spot,” he said, of his home two miles into the “forest” in Volcano.

Varez recently saw a man wearing his “Damien shirt” at the grocery store. The experience gave him an artist’s satisfaction.

“If you make a painting or a print, it goes to somebody’s house and that is it — you don’t see it,” Varez said.

Creating wearable art is “one way to meet a lot of people.”

Varez likes to paint listening to the music of St. Hildegard von Bingen, a German mystic, author and composer who lived from 1098 to 1179. He said that the saint lived as an anchorite in much the same stark and removed lifestyle as his.

The shirts are being printed in blue, black and red motifs. They will be available Sept. 25 at Reyn Spooner retail stores, Macy’s, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace gift shop and at the Reyn’s website, www.reyns.com.

Since the shirt is a limited edition — about 1,000 — Hubbard advises those who want one to purchase it as soon as possible.

“If they want it, they should get it now, when it is done it is done,” he said. “That is how most of our shirts are and that is what makes our business interesting.”