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Saint Damien of Molokai

Western calendar
15 April, 10 May in the United States, the day he reached Molokai
Orthodox calendar
Not kept

Jozef De Veuster of Tremelo in Belgium took the name Damien when he joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, and in 1863 he took his sick brother's place on the mission to the Hawaiian Islands. When the government sent everyone with leprosy to Molokai, his bishop would not order any priest to go, knowing it could be a death sentence, and Damien was the first of four volunteers, landing at Kalaupapa on 10 May 1873. He stayed at his own request and theirs, caught the disease himself, and died on 15 April 1889 after sixteen years among them, "a leper with the lepers", as Benedict XVI said when he made him a saint in 2009.

Sources

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose these two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.