Calle del Padre Damián

Behind the name is a Belgian priest, Jozef de Veuster, who in 1873 landed on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, where the kingdom confined its lepers. He chose to live among the hundreds of abandoned patients: he built houses, dug graves, dressed sores and shared his water and his food. After sixteen years he contracted the disease he tended and died on the island in 1889, at forty-nine. The world remembered him as the apostle of the lepers, and in 2009 the Church canonized him as Saint Damien of Molokai. Calle del Padre Damián belongs to the Hispanoamérica neighborhood. Halfway along stands the church of the Sacred Hearts, his congregation, presided over by a bronze sculpture nearly three meters tall by Amadeo Gabino: a figure without features, hands raised, standing for his kinship with the voiceless sick. On the door, an engraved line reads “and the lepers are made clean.”