Damien Inspireert* | 150 YEARS: Tonga, a new mission

“Ouch!” exclaimed St. Damien de Veuster. Was it a poke from the thorny kiawe grown thick or from a mosquito thinking this foreign blood was a perfect Belgian beer? St. Damien had to get used to the flora and fauna of his adopted country. Coming from the cooler farmlands of Tremolo, he learned to cope with the high humidity and the salty sea spray that added a heaviness to his woolen habit. However, through all the challenges, he was sustained: “I find my consolation in my only companion who does not abandon me: our divine Savior in the Eucharist.”

For St. Damien, the work of prayer was never separated from the work of his hands. Inside the churches he built, he celebrated not only Mass and the sacraments, but a devotion close to his heart. “We have established the perpetual adoration in the two churches of the leprosarium,” he wrote. St. Damien was making real the Kingdom of God at Kalawao.

Move from the Kingdom of Belgium and the Kingdom of Hawaii to the Kingdom of Tonga. In 2013, Sacred Hearts missionary Father Paul Zaccone, a Nebraska native, was assigned as a teacher at Apifo’ou College, a Tongan co-ed school of 1,500 Polynesian students.

Of his experience Father Zaccone wrote: “Yes, perhaps it is hot, and yes, the humidity is enough, along with the ants and mosquitos, to consider myself as the Sacred Hearts Congregation’s first Tongan martyr, but when you are doing God’s work, he always provides!”

Micah Hicks, born in Guam and raised on Oahu, is a Sacred Hearts lay missionary in Tonga. He shared stories of “how during our track and field day our students would share a pair of shoes and socks among four people! One shoe a piece for two students, one sock apiece for two others.”

Speaking of sharing: “In the rain, students walk six or seven to an umbrella, and if I am carrying mine I have a flock of them pressed against me,” he said. “Yet in this poverty, in these circumstances we would find impossible, they find room for charity.”

The secret to life in the missions? According to Father Zaccone, “It is the power of prayer that helps us to transcend souls, and the intercession of the Sacred Hearts and St. Damien of Molokai.”