An undated photo from the Sacred Hearts Fathers archives of a Hawaiian grass house like the ones Father Damien’s parishioners would live in.

Before Molokai

Blessed Damien’s first assignment took him to the Big Island where, amid rugged mountains, valleys and coasts, he built churches, spread the faith and embraced the Hawaiian people

By Father Louis H. Yim | Hawaii Catholic Herald

(This story was first published in the Hawaii Catholic Herald in two parts in April of 1989. All the priests in this story belonged to the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary)

When Father Damien de Veuster died on April 15, 1889, he had been a priest for nearly 25 years. Although much has been written about the 16 years he spent on Molokai, little has been told about the nine years of his priesthood laboring as a young missionary on the Island of Hawaii in Puna and later in Kohala.

Father Damien was ordained a priest with two other companions on May 21, 1864, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, Honolulu. The next day, Sunday, he offered his first Mass in the cathedral before a large crowd of Hawaiians. Later he wrote how he was overwhelmed with emotion while distributing Communion: “Were not my heart so hard, I think it would have melted like wax!”

He and another newly ordained, Father Clement Evrard, were immediately assigned to the Big Island, he to Puna in the east, and Father Clement to Kohala and Hamakua in the north. Bishop Louis Maigret accompanied them on the trip over since he was scheduled, on June 29, 1864, to bless the new stone church of St. Paul in Kawainui, Kona.

They set sail out of Honolulu in early June and the next day arrived in Lahaina, Maui, for a stopover. The occasion was to become an unforgettable misadventure for the young Father Damien. After celebrating Mass in Lahaina’s Maria Lanakila Church, the three reboarded their ship. But shortly, out at sea, a fire broke out and the ship had to return to Lahaina for repairs. Two weeks later they were still in Lahaina. Father Damien recalled, “I myself was not sorry for this.” He was happily soaking up the knowledge and experience of veteran missionary Father Aubert Bouillon who had been stationed at the Maui mission for almost 15 years.

Stranded

One Sunday morning Father Damien volunteered to visit a village about “five or six leagues” from the mission. “There, for the first time,” he wrote, “I preached and heard confessions in the (Hawaiian) language.” But upon returning to Lahaina the next day, he was shocked to learn that the bishop and Father Clement had boarded a passing schooner on Sunday afternoon. Father Damien commented, “What a fix I was in! How was I to rejoin them? There was no ship to be had!”

Some time later he managed to sail out of Lahaina and arrived in Kailua, Kona. At the Kailua mission of St. Michael, he was informed by Father Stanislas Lebret that the bishop, after blessing the Kawainui church, had set out for Hilo. Father Clement was in Kailua and was soon to be escorted to his Kohala mission by Father Stanislas. Father Damien decided to join them and, somehow, continue on to Puna. In Kohala he found a Hawaiian guide to assist him.

For three and a half days they traveled by foot through the Waimea and Hamakua regions and on Saturday, July 24, 1864, arrived in Hilo. At St. Joseph Mission in Hilo to his surprise he found the bishop. It had been almost a month since their unexpected separation and in the process he had already trekked through more than half of the coastal regions of the Big Island!

In Hilo, Father Damien met Father Charles Pouzot who headed the Catholic mission there since 1846, and Father Celestine Ruault, a young priest stationed for the past six years in the Kau district. They were both neighbors to his Puna mission although a considerable distance separated them from each other. The bishop was in Hilo for Confirmation services on Sunday and was to depart for Honolulu the next day. He directed Father Celestine to take Father Damien to Puna before returning to Kau. And to the young missionary of Puna, the bishop pointed out that his “mission was very much in its infancy.” When Father Damien began his Puna assignment in August of 1864, be soon learned how altogether true the bishop’s words were.

Primitive conditions

The Puna district was first visited by Catholic missionaries in 1840 and 1841. Fathers Robert A. Walsh and Ernest Huertel, who established the island’s first Catholic mission on July 5, 1840, in Kailua, Kona, had made several visits in the area. By 1848, Puna had its first resident priest, Father Eustache Preteseille. But when he was reassigned to Oahu in 1857, the district was again without a priest. When Father Celestine was assigned to the Kau mission in 1858, he was asked to make occasional visits to the 200 Catholic natives living in the Puna area.

When Father Damien arrived in Puna, there were no churches, not even a house to live in. A simple dwelling was quickly put up and in a matter of days the young priest was building two churches in the district. We learned this in a letter to his brother Pamphile in which he also asked for two chapel bells from Europe which he never received.

During his brief time in Puna Father Damien may have constructed four or five chapels. They were all of the native thatched hut-variety which never managed to remain permanent. One, perhaps, was built at Kapaahu and later replaced by the stone church of St. Joseph built in 1868. Father Clement was the builder of St. Joseph but, for many years, it was mistakenly called “Father Damien’s church.” Although abandoned in the early 1900s, its walls stood up until they were almost completely covered over by the Kilauea lava flows in 1987.

On the move

As with the chapels he put up, we have no records where Father Damien maintained his residence while in Puna. A priest’s life in mid-1800 Hawaii was, of course, not the same as his modern counterpart. Father Damien never stayed, so to speak, at home. On a horse or a mule, his priestly duties consisted of making the rounds, requiring several days, of the villages in the district, places like Kaimu, Kalapana, Kaneleau, Pohoiki, Kapaahu, Kehena, Panau, Laiapuki, Malama, Kahuwai, Kapoho and Halepuaa.

Father Charles would later note, “His zeal would not let him stay a day in one place.” And years later, maintaining the same kind of routine in Kohala, he once was asked by a Hawaiian where he lived. Father Damien jokingly gave his answer by pointing to the saddle on his horse!

After Father Celestine introduced the young missionary to his Puna mission, he commented, ‘The people are completely happy with him, and he with them!” Father Damien had an immediate love-affair with the Hawaiian people. In a letter to his brother he extolled their praise: “You could not wish for a better people: gentle, pleasant-mannered, exceedingly tenderhearted, most hospitable and ready to deprive themselves even of necessities in order to supply your every want!” Above all else, he was their spiritual father and they were his children.

Six months, 100 baptisms

In the scattered villages of Puna, the priest cared for his “children.” He preached and gave catechism instructions, heard confessions and anointed the sick. He carried a portable altar in his saddle pack and, where there were no chapels, offered Mass in the people’s homes. He baptized and married people readily. The very first time he went around Puna, he baptized a total of 29 adults and children.

Interestingly, the first three individuals he baptized, he gave the Christian names of Damien, Catherine and Francis, which are his name and those of his parents. The Puna baptismal records show 325 baptisms administered in the 17 years before Damien from 1847 to early 1864. From August 1864 to January 1865, the length of Father Damien’s Puna assignment, he had baptized nearly 100 persons and performed seven marriages.

Father Stanislas, on July 13, 1864, immediately after meeting the two newly ordained missionaries in Kailua, Kona, wrote to Father Modeste Favens, the provincial in Honolulu, that Father Clement, with his poor physical condition, did not appear suited for the rugged mountains and valleys of Kohala and Hamakua.

“I know Puna,” he wrote, “and of all the districts in Hawaii, it is the easiest to serve.” He recommended Puna for Father Clement and Kohala and Hamakua for Father Damien, who was “a strong man.” After a few months, these observations were borne out. Finding his mission physically too difficult, Father Clement, with Father Damien agreeing, asked the bishop if the two priests could exchange districts. The bishop approved.

Father Damien’s love-affair with the people of Puna had lasted six months. Finding it “harder than leaving home, he departed from Puna and arrived in Kohala in February 1865 to begin his new assignment.

Kohala and Hamaku

With an area of more than a thousand square miles, Kohala and Hamakua was the largest of five Catholic missions established on the Big Island. A succession of Catholic missionaries had labored in the area since 1841.

Father Damien would work out of the village of Waiapuka where the principal church of the mission was. The wooden church, St. Louis, was named after and blessed by Bishop Louis Maigret on June 24, 1858. It was built by Father Eustache Maheu who died in Kohala in 1860 at age 32. A priest’s house stood on the church grounds. It was a large thatched “pili” grass hut with five rooms. Father Damien called it “luxurious.”

Immediately upon arrival, Father Damien made the rounds of his vast territory. In Puna, it took him three days to cover his mission; here it required six weeks. On “these long journeys,” he wrote to his parents, “we cannot travel by rail or by carriage … we have mules and horses ... sometimes I have to go by boat.”

And he could have added, even on foot. He ministered to the nearly 1,000 Catholics of his mission in scattered communities along the shorelines, the mountains and in near-inaccessible valleys. Official church records noted the villages he visited: Kawaihae, Niulii, Waiakamalii, Iole, Pololu, Heehia, Pukapu, Alaula, Makalapa, Honokane, Honoipo, Waikaloa, Nalaula, Kaiopiki, Kokio, Makeanehu and others.

His travels brought moments of adventure and excitement. Once, late at night in the mountains, his mule wandered off. He struggled on foot through the wilderness and darkness until a barking dog directed him to a hut where a Hawaiian family took him in for the night.

On another occasion, he and two Hawaiian paddlers braved rough seas in a canoe trying to visit a village in an isolated valley. The canoe capsized and they had to swim to shore and return home. Undaunted, he tried again a week later, this time, “on horseback, on foot.” It took him four days to get there.

On another occasion, he lost his way trying to reach a Catholic community in the mountains. He literally climbed hill after hill after hill until, with many cuts and scratches, he found the place. These are incidents he mentions in his letters.

When he did manage to stay at home, he had much to keep him busy. Besides his priestly duties, the son of a farmer farmed. With the help of the people, he kept pigs, chickens, sheep, a cow, along with his mules and horses. He had beehives which provided honey for food and wax for the candles used in his churches. He planted coffee and tobacco, potatoes and beans, which, at times, he sold, bartered, or used to pay off debts to the Catholic mission in Honolulu.

He had a close relationship with the Hawaiian people. As the years went by, he spoke Hawaiian fluently, although he noticed the people were more impressed with the preaching of his catechists than with his! He became accustomed to Hawaiian ways. He squatted on the matted floor in the people’s homes and dug his fingers in the common calabash of poi to share meals with them. For him, dessert was smoking his pipe after these meals.

He enthusiastically wrote home to Belgium about a big church luau where the animals were “cooked in the kanaka oven, that is to say, in red-hot stones.” After the church service, the people gathered “all around the church, on the grass. Something like a thousand people are there to celebrate. As our kanakas always eat with their fingers, no trouble about knives and forks ... everyone brings his own with him!”

Cultural difference

Yet, there were things Hawaiian which Father Damien found difficult to understand. He was shocked, for one thing, with the seemingly open sexuality of the natives. They seemed to him to have no inhibitions, in words and actions, toward sexual matters. Writing to his superior in Europe, he commented, “The children have scarcely learned how to talk before they know more than a young theologian still has to find out.”

Another matter was the clinging, even among his Christian flock, to the old religious practices of their ancestors. Once, as a young priest in Puna, he met a Hawaiian preparing a sacrificial offering to Pele, the Hawaiian fire goddess, in the volcano area. He immediately gave the person a lecture on the Christian concept of the fires of hell. In Kohala he encountered many who sought out the local “kahuna” to assist with their problems, especially their illnesses. He readily opposed these practices, convinced that the kahuna knew “no more about medicine than my horse.”

Missing confession

Although extremely happy with his people and his work, Father Damien felt the loneliness and isolation of a missionary’s life. At times he longed to converse with someone other than a Hawaiian and, more especially, a fellow priest. And he needed the spiritual solace of confession much more than it was available in Kohala.

In Puna he didn’t have to go more than 10 days to be with one of his confreres from the neighboring mission. In Kohala, he tells us, “Every two or three months I try to see Father Charles in Hilo or Father Regis at Kona. But that’s not enough! Yet, how can I do any more when each confession represents 50 or 60 leagues on the road? ... A couple of weeks ago I wanted to visit Hilo to go to confession but because of the bad sailing I had to turn back without seeing anyone. So, my only confessor is our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.”

Responding to his constant pleas, the bishop in April 1868 divided the mission between Father Damien in Kohala and Father Gulstan Ropert in the Hamakua district.

If Father Damien had never achieved fame with his ministry on Molokai, he could easily be remembered in the annals of the Catholic Church in Hawaii as the great builder of churches. In the six months he spent in Puna he had built four or five thatched chapels. In Kohala he did the same, erecting a number of “grass hut” chapels in the village communities.

But perhaps his first attempt at putting up a substantial building, “not sort of a hut, as most of our chapels are, but of a regular chapel built entirely of wood,” happened about nine months after coming to Kohala. In a letter dated October 1865, he tells about baptizing a group of Hawaiians who in gratitude made a promise to put up a wooden church in their village. Some were skilled wood cutters who went into the mountains to cut down trees for the lumber.

Father Damien commented, “Here I had everything ready but who was to build the chapel with these materials? To hire a carpenter ... would entail a great expense. So I made plans as best as I could and began the construction with two natives.”

His church building continued throughout Kohala and Hamakua. When Father Gulstan came to Hamakua, Father Damien had just completed a chapel for him in Waipio Valley. In the small villages, he erected simple thatched chapels, in the larger communities, more permanent wooden churches. Brother Calixte Lacomte a skilled carpenter from the Honolulu mission, came over to assist with a couple projects, but for the rest, Father Damien did the work with the help of the people.

His letters to the Honolulu mission became a steady request for lumber, shingles, glass, locks, kegs of nails, paint, brushes and putty; and crosses, pictures, candlesticks, chalices, altar stones and ornaments. He requested, once more, for a church bell from his brother Pamphile in Europe but never received it. He had to be content with the blowing of a conch shell to summon the people to church.

His church floors were simply covered with “lauhala” mats. He wrote, “At first, I made (church) benches for them but they would not use them ... and I find (the mats) much more economical.”

All this building activity prompted Father Modeste, the provincial in Honolulu, to remark in a letter: “Fathers Damien and Clement are asking for chapels ... they have to have patience. Chapels don’t grow like mushrooms!”

Disappearing flock

Strange as it may seem, we do not know the names and locations of some of the churches Father Damien built. For one thing, a radical social upheaval was taking place. Introduced diseases, and an inability to cope with the overpowering Western influence in the Kingdom, was literally killing off the Hawaiian people. Even Father Damien pointed out, “Death carries off in these islands more in a year than are brought to life; so the native population is continually diminishing.”

In a short period of time, many Hawaiian villages were also diminishing, and along with them, many mission churches. Within two decades, many chapels and churches built by Father Damien were no more.

Three of Father Damien’s churches in Kohala, however, survived through the turn of the century. At Waikaa (Kawaihae-uka), he and Brother Calixte constructed Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in 1867. The church was closed about 1905 because of the lack of people living in the area. St. John the Evangelist Church in Waiaka, the Waimea district, was built in 1869 on a site, Father Damien informs us, indicated to him in a dream. In April 1900, the church was destroyed by fire.

In 1870, he erected Our Lady of Victory (Maria Lanakila) Church in Halawa. In 1901, it was completely renovated with much of the original church removed. In 1936, the church was relocated to another site in Halawa and renamed St. George Church.

On the island of Maui, Father Leonor Fouesnel had just completed his magnificent stone church, St. Anthony, in the village of Wailuku. The blessing by Bishop Maigret was set for May 3, 1873, and invitations were sent throughout the mission vicariate. Father Damien was one of those invited. When he left his Kohala mission for Maui, he had no idea that he would never return. At a private moment, when the bishop was gathered with his priests in Wailuku, he discussed a proposed mission to those afflicted with Hansen’s disease at the Kalawao colony on Molokai and Father Damien volunteered.

Sailing out of Maui, he arrived at Molokai on May 10, 1873. For Father Damien, the nine years as a priest on the Island of Hawaii were filled with great accomplishments. The years ahead, at his new mission, would be no different.