The feast day of St. Damien, May 10, is an unusual date selection but an appropriate one.
It is customary to chose for a saint’s feast the date of his or her death, the day that he or she entered into eternal life. That day, in St. Damien’s case, is April 15, and for years, before his beatification, it had been his unofficial feast day in Hawaii.
With beatification and canonization comes the honor of placement on the church’s liturgical calendar as an optional or obligatory “memorial,” or feast, with special Mass prayers and readings chosen for that day’s saint.
However, April 15 often falls during Lent when the church does not celebrate optional and obligatory memorials, essentially resulting in a feast in name only.
The solution: change the feast day.
May 10 was picked because it marks a significant event in the life of St. Damien de Veuster, a day on which he performed a particular act of supreme charity and selflessness that would ultimately lead to his canonization.
It was the day in 1873, 140 years ago, that he stepped onto the island of Molokai and made it both his life’s work and his deathplace.
Father Damien arrived at the leprosy settlement from Maui, where Bishop Louis Maigret and priests of the Hawaii mission had celebrated the dedication of the new St. Anthony Church in Wailuku.
Accompanied by the bishop, Father Damien stepped off the ship Kilauea onto Kalaupapa at around 11 a.m. It was a Saturday.
Bishop Maigret describes the event in his journal: “(We) visit the leprosarium (hospital) at Kalawao — enter the humble chapel recently erected by Br. Bertram — our poor neophytes come out in impressive enough numbers — I speak a few words to them — They seem happy to see us — Fr. Damien will remain some two weeks among them — a petition bearing 200 signatures is presented to us (me) they are asking that a priest remain permanently among them, but where is one to be found …”
The “two weeks” referred to an agreement to have four priests rotating the Kalaupapa assignment. Father Damien was the first.
However, two days later, Father Damien wrote, “I am willing to devote my life to the leprosy victims. It is absolutely necessary for a priest to remain here. The harvest is ripe.”
Father Damien remained with his new flock 16 years, until his death in 1889.
When St. Damien’s 1995 beatification made him eligible for a spot on the liturgical calendar as an “optional memorial,” the May 10 date was desired to avoid April 15’s Lenten conflict.
But official approval was needed.
In November 1999, Honolulu Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo asked the U.S. bishops to place Father Damien’s feast on the American Catholic calendar on May 10 as an “optional memorial.” The bishops voted overwhelmingly in favor of the request and the decision was sent to Rome for final authorization.
However, on Dec. 20, 1999, when the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments approved the U.S. bishops’ decision to create an optional memorial, it changed the date back to April 15.
So on April 4 of the following year, Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote back to the Vatican congregation asking that the observance be returned to May 10 as originally requested.
A year later, in a letter dated April 24, 2001, the congregation gave its consent. The bishops were informed of the change in early May.
Fourteen days after St. Damien’s canonization on Oct. 11, 2009, another Vatican degree, this one made at the request of Bishop Larry Silva, elevated the feast from an “optional” memorial to an “obligatory” memorial in Hawaii.
That change by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments meant that all Masses celebrated in Hawaii on May 10 — unless it falls on a Sunday — must be for St. Damien. It is not a holy day of obligation.
The Mass prayers are specific to Father Damien. Except for the Gospel, they are essentially the same ones used since Father Damien’s 1995 beatification.
The opening prayer of the feast day Mass reads in part, “Father of mercy, in St. Damien you have given us a shining witness of love for the poorest and most abandoned. Grant that by his intercession, as faithful witnesses of the heart of your Son Jesus, we too may be servants of the most needy and rejected.”
The Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship changed the Gospel reading from the verses about the Good Shepherd in John, chapter 10, to the account of the washing of the feet in John 13. According to an April, 2010, memo from the director of the diocesan Office of Worship, it was to avoid repetition since the Good Shepherd narrative is also the reading for the Third Sunday of Easter, which falls around the same time as St. Damien’s feast.
For the rest of the United States, the feast of St. Damien is an optional memorial.
