A couple of weeks ago, on 10 May, the church celebrated the feast day of St Damien of Molokai.
Even before he died of leprosy in 1889, the Belgian missionary was famed around the world for the courage and compassion he showed as the chaplain of an isolated settlement for Hawaiian lepers.
He had volunteered, knowing that Molokai would be, in all likelihood, a death sentence. And it was.
He was the sort of priest whom Pope Francis loved – a shepherd with the smell of the sheep, a rough diamond, perhaps, but generous to a fault.
Surprisingly, through one of those stray sheep, one he never met, Fr Damien had an Australian connection, the great 19th century novelist Robert Louis Stevenson.
RLS is best known for adventures like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, novels about swashbuckling heroes from the British Isles.
But he ended his days far, far away, on a Pacific isle, Samoa. His travels in this part of the world took him to Sydney four times. He is featured in the brass plaques in Writer’s Walk at Circular Quay.
RLS published only one piece of work in Sydney, but it is a remarkable one – a blistering defence of the reputation of Fr Damien.
He was an improbable defender of a Catholic priest. As a proud Scot, he was deep dyed in Presbyterianism.
As a bohemian rebel, he was an unbeliever. He had a complicated marriage with a divorced woman 10 years his senior.
But he was big-hearted, passionate, and idealistic. And when he read in the 26 October 1889 issue of a Sydney newspaper called The Presbyterian a letter disparaging Fr Damien by a minister in Honolulu, the Rev C.M. Hyde, he erupted in volcanic fury.
Rev Hyde had informed his Sydney readers that Fr Damien was “a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted”.
Furthermore, “He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.”
And finally, the work of this disreputable Papist cleric was useless anyway: “Other (sic) have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life.”
In response, in 1890, RLS published an open letter which was – as often happens when writers are inhaling brimstone and warming their hands over the flames of righteous indignation – some 30 times longer than the minister’s casual slander.
Unfortunately for Rev Hyde, RLS was a literary genius, one of the great prose stylists of the English language. It was a rebuke which would have touched the heart of Pope Francis.
“Life in the lazaretto,” he wrote, “is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have felt it was (even today) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell in.
“It is not the fear of possible infection. That seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the disgust of the visitor’s surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes.”
And yet, Fr Damien chose to minister there – he “shut-to with his own hand the doors of his own sepulchre.”
How about the Rev Hyde’s sneers?
“Damien was coarse,” he had written. “It is very possible,” roared RLS.
“You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture?”
“Damien was dirty,” said Hyde. “He was,” said RLS. “Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade! But the clean Dr Hyde was at his food in a fine house.”
“Damien was headstrong – I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head and heart.”
As for the final accusation, RLS tunes his violin to a high C. “Damien was not a pure man in his relations with women, etc.”
RLS had been in a pub in Samoa when a drunk said the same thing. A man sprang to his feet – another of Pope Francis’s stray sheep – and said “‘You miserable little —-’ (here is a word I dare not print). “You miserable little —-,’ he cried, ‘if the story were a thousand times true, can’t you see you are a million times a lower —- for daring to repeat it?’”
And what if it were true, RLS asked. “The least tender should be moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!”
And he concludes with these scathing words:
“You had a father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance?
“That you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days? And that the last thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press?
“Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you grace to see it.”
More than a hundred years later, when all the figures in this spat are nearly forgotten, RLS’s words still smoulder.
They have particular relevance for today’s epidemic of detraction, slander and back-biting in social media. As both RLS and Pope Francis would advise us in the words of the Gospel, “judge not, lest you be judged.”
