HCH photo/Anna Weaver

Father Thierry de Roucy, left, and Father Gonzague Leroux of the Priestly Fraternity of Molokai stand in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace on Jan. 20 by a plaque that notes the ordination of St. Damien de Veuster in the church in 1864.

Sanctifying place

The Priestly Fraternity of Molokai visits for the first time the island with which it holds a spiritual link

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

No member of the Priestly Fraternity of Molokai had ever been there. Until last month.
   Father Thierry de Roucy and Father Gonzague Leroux visited the Hawaii Catholic Herald on Jan. 20 and explained why, and answered other questions about their 16-year-old international group, which has no physical ties to the place whose name it has adopted.

The Molokai connection, it turns out, is purely spiritual. And part of something much bigger.

That something bigger is Heart’s Home, an international Catholic movement that spreads a “culture of compassion” to impoverished places around the world through mostly lay volunteers living in prayerful communities.

Father de Roucy, its founder, an unassuming man with a soft, quiet smile, envisioned Heart’s Home in a literal “flash” of inspiration.

It came to him on Jan. 4, 1990, while the French priest, a member of the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus and Mary ordained in 1983, was saying the rosary after lunch outside his monastery. He was on the First Joyful Mystery, the Annunciation, when the idea “to start a community for the poorest and most suffering in the world” descended upon him like “a light.”

He described the moment in more detail in a homily he delivered on Jan. 4 in New York on the 20th anniversary of that date:

“Suddenly, as in a flash, I was given the grace to behold the Movement as it exists today. No extasis, no earthquake, no apocalyptic vision … only a breath, a very sweet light … No words, but a silence full of a Presence.”

The idea was to open “houses of compassion” in destitute areas to serve the poor, particularly children, by visiting them and keeping an open door.

“My idea was not to found schools, hospitals or orphanages,” Father de Roucy explained further to the Hawaii Catholic Herald, “but to open a simple house and welcome them during the day and be their friend.”

“The foundation of our work is friendship,” he said.

Father de Roucy, now 52, opened his first two homes in South America with a dozen volunteers and the ecclesial help of two bishop friends, one in Salvador Da Bahia, Brazil, the other in Parana, Argentina.

The volunteers were mostly young lay men and women in their 20s, recruited mainly by word of mouth for one or two years of service.

The priest described the communities as “contemplative” with a daily holy hour, rosary, evening prayer and Mass.

He purposely gave the movement a secular-sounding name to avoid drawing unwanted attention in countries like Vietnam and Syria that have shown antagonism toward religion.

As Heart’s Home grew and drew in more people, some of the volunteers wanted to continue their commitment in ways more permanent than that of a lay missionary.

“They wanted to grow in their faith and intimacy with Jesus,” Father de Roucy said. They wanted to take vows, be ordained, and surrender the rest of their lives to the movement’s mission of compassion.

That led to the development of four new branches of Heart’s Home:

• St. Maximilian Kolbe Fraternities live Heart’s Home’s charism of compassion in their daily lives whatever their occupation.
• Permanent Members dedicate their lives in celibacy for Heart’s Home apostolic mission.
• The Servants of God’s Presence are women who live the Heart’s Home charism within a religious congregation. A total of 30 sisters live in communities of five or six each.
• The Sacerdotal Molokai Fraternity are priests whose ministry is in accordance with Heart’s Home’s mission.

Today the movement has 35 houses and two Heart’s Home villages in about 20 countries. It has 175 missionaries, 54 permanent volunteers and nine employees. More than 1,200 volunteers have served since 1990.

Financial support comes from sponsors and donations. At some locations, volunteers have part-time jobs.

Heart’s Home has one home in the United States, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is planning another in the San Francisco Bay Area, probably in Oakland.

The organization was approved in 2000 as a Private Association of the Faithful by Cardinal Estanislao Esteban Karlic, Archbishop of Parana.

It is also an active member of the Council of Ecclesial Movements and New Communities of the Archdiocese of New York.

In 2005, Heart’s Home was granted special consultative status by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

The Molokai Fraternity

Father Leroux, Father de Roucy’s traveling companion to Hawaii and a fellow Frenchman, is one of the newest of the 28 members of the Molokai Fraternity worldwide.

The tall, dark-haired 35-year-old was ordained last June. The son of farmers from Moulin-Sous-Touvent, a “one-windmill” town in northern France, he joined a Heart’s Home in Argentina in 1996 while studying for a master’s degree in biology there. He had had his eye on a possible food industry career.

In 1997, he met Father de Roucy and volunteered for two years in a new home in “a very deprived area” of Kazakhstan.

“The experience was very tough,” Father Leroux said.

The former Soviet country was very poor, he said, but the real affliction there was not poverty but “hopelessness.”

High rates of unemployment, alcoholism, abuse, suicide and emigration created a society where friendships were difficult, and smiles very few, he said. It had deteriorated to the point where volunteers were treated with suspicion because children left their presence happy.

One man came to the house because he wanted to learn “how to be a father” so he could make his children smile.

“Through this experience I discovered I had a call to become a priest,” Father Leroux said.

The experience also validates Father de Roucy’s choice of Molokai as the name for his fraternity of priests.

The idea came to him in Senegal, the West African republic where Heart’s Home has a presence.

“I was praying to receive a name,” he said, “and I received the name Father Damien.”

The life and heroism of the Belgian saint was well known to Father de Roucy growing up in France. And Father Damien’s own desire to live among the sick and outcast and become one of them was similar to the calling of Heart’s Home.

But Father de Roucy would not name his fraternity after Father Damien, but rather after the place and its people that made him a saint.

“When I was studying in Rome,” Father de Roucy said, “a Dominican father taught me that it is the penitent who sanctifies the priest.”

“I am sure that without Molokai, Father Damien would not be a saint,” he said. “The people sanctify us. The people provoke our hearts to give totally. The place provokes us to be a saint, the people of the place.”

Naming the fraternity after Molokai was a “homage to the people,” he said.

A sentence from Pope Benedict XVI’s homily at Father Damien’s canonization last Oct. 11 would endorse Father de Roucy’s name selection: “[Father Damien] invites us to open our eyes toward the ‘leprosies’ that disfigure the humanity of our brothers and sisters and that today still call, more than for our generosity, for the charity of our serving presence.”

Father de Roucy and Father Leroux were on topside Molokai Jan. 14-20 to scout out facilities for a retreat in August for 30 to 35 members of their worldwide Heart’s Home community.

They had previously known about the island only through photos and books. They found it more than they expected.

“The island was beautiful,” Father Leroux said, but they liked the residents more.

“It is a good community,” he said. “People support one another a lot.”

They have a “great spirit of hospitality,” he added, relating a story of how a woman gave him a fish her husband had just caught when he could not find one to buy at the market.

Father Leroux, who has worked in Brooklyn, said he had to remind himself that “this is also the United States of America.”

“It is totally different,” he said.

The two priests stopped in Honolulu for a few hours before heading back to the mainland. They were able to celebrate a mid-morning Mass in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace where Father Damien was ordained and where his relic now rests.

Why did they decide to visit Molokai now, more than 15 years after the creation of the Molokai Fraternity?

“We were waiting for an invitation from Damien to come,” said Father de Roucy.

That invitation was his canonization in October.

The trip this time did not include a stop in the place St. Damien actually worked — Kalaupapa. That could not be arranged, but the priests are looking forward to spending some time there in August.