Father Damien
"HOSE men gripped by a single overmastering passion are so much the despair of their fellows that we tend to explain their lives in terms of some unusual power. To say, for example, that it was piety which took Father Damien to Molokai explains nothing. After all there must be thousands, perhaps mil-lions,-of people trying to live the good life and yet their light does not shine before men with the same brilliance. With Father Damien it was different. inexplicable, and completely certain from the moment he felt the call’ to the Church until he died of leprosy at Molokai. Even admitting the difficulties of his temperament, brought out in a dramatised BBC script, presented from 3ZB, these seem irrelevant alongside the splendid trail he blazed and which brought hope to those who were condemned to the "death before death." In him the more usual tussle between good and evil seemed as if in abeyance, he appeared not so much to have chosen as to have responded to an unequivocal command, And yet the pattern of human life, even of ideal life, as reffected in the Gospels, does not allow us to draw these comfortable, and somewhat evasive, conclusions.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 656, 1 February 1952, Page 13
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201Father Damien New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 656, 1 February 1952, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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