Father Damien (1840 – 1889) was a Roman Catholic priest from Belgium and member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a missionary religious institute. He won recognition for his ministry in the Kingdom of Hawaii, to people with leprosy, who had been placed under a government-sanctioned medical quarantine on the island of Molokaʻi.
In January 1936, at the request of the Belgian government, Damien's body was returned to his native land. It was brought back aboard the Belgian sailing ship Mercator and now rests in Leuven, a historic university city close to the village where Damien was born. After his beatification in June 1995, the remains of his right hand were returned to Hawaii, and re-interred in his original grave on Molokaʻi.
In 2005, Damien was honored with the title of De Grootste Belg, chosen as "The Greatest Belgian" throughout that country's history in polling conducted by the Flemish public broadcasting service, VRT.
In 1889, Saint Damien died from the disease he worked so long to treat. Nearly 90 years after his death, in 1977, he was proclaimed by Pope Paul VI to be venerable, the first step toward sainthood. In October 2009, Father Damien was named a saint at a ceremony in Rome.
