In 1873, a Belgian priest named Joseph De Veuster, known as Father Damien, stepped off a boat onto the island of Molokai, where the Hawaiian government had exiled hundreds of people with leprosy to die. People that no doctor would treat. People that no official would touch. The colony had become a place without law or tenderness, where the dying were left to rot among the dead.

Father Damien stayed when others would not come. He bathed their open sores with his own hands. He built their houses and dug their graves. He ate from the same bowl, sharing a pipe with men whose fingers had fallen away. When he preached, he began with the words “we lepers” years before the disease found his own body. He had stopped drawing any line between himself and the people he served.

Sixteen years in, he died of leprosy. He had given the colony everything, including his flesh.