Life’s little ironies

Today, a friend of mine sent to me a link from The New York Times about news that had escaped my notice concerning a personal hero of mine. Jozef De Veuster, better known as Father Damien, will be canonized today as a saint by The Vatican. It has been well over a century since Father Damien ministered to and cared for the lepers of Hawaii’s Kalaupapa peninsula before succumbing to the disease himself. The recognition was a very long time coming.

After 9/11, in deep need of some healing of my own, or some confirmation of man’s essential goodness, I visited the leper colony that Damien had made famous, and while I can’t say the visit lit the candles of the world for me, I can say that I found it strangely ennobling and humbling to visit the vestiges of his life and work. I am pleased that, after such a long and tortuous struggle, Father Damien has finally received the status within the Church he so truly deserves.

It is more than a little ironic that Damien’s long path to sainthood concludes today on the weekend after the Nobel Prize committee announced Barack Obama as its winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Damien’s canonization – and more so, the story of his life and work – puts into perspective for me just how divorced from reality the Nobel committee has become. My own opinion is that the Nobel Peace Prize has for many years been something of a laughingstock, a pathetic stab at relevance for a group of people otherwise highly irrelevant. The juxtaposition of Damien’s canonization with the committee’s decision for Obama is as much edifying as it is a sad comment on the emptiness, spiritual and otherwise, of the so-called elite opinion of Europe.