The Poitiers 2026 Session made a stop of deep spiritual significance in Tremelo, the Flemish town where Jozef De Veuster, the future Saint Damien of Molokai, was born.
Following the visit to the Museum and birthplace of the apostle to those suffering from leprosy, Fr. Juan Carlos Tinjacá sscc, Delegation Superior of Flanders, gave a talk on the saint's vocation, inviting the group to trace, step by step, the path that led a young Flemish farm boy to become the "apostle of the lepers."
Fr. Tinjacá situated Damien within the context of nineteenth-century Catholic Flanders, marked by a strong popular religious revival: Sunday Mass, the rosary, processions, and devotion to the Sacred Heart formed the human and spiritual soil in which his calling took root. From there, he traced the major milestones of a vocation that was not a single isolated moment but a journey: the letter to his parents on Christmas Day 1858 announcing his decision to follow religious life, his entrance into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts in Leuven on February 2, 1859, and his religious profession on October 7, 1860.
A particularly striking moment of the talk was the gesture by which Damien set out for Hawaii in 1863, taking the place of his sick brother, Fr. Pamphile. The Delegation Superior of Flanders emphasized how this episode reveals a vocation capable of reading the unexpected as God's own mediation, and how the years of mission on the Big Island of Hawaii, between 1864 and 1873, were a stage of learning and self-emptying before the definitive gift of self on Molokai, where Damien arrived on May 10, 1873, to serve as pastor, doctor, and counselor to those suffering from leprosy.
Juan Carlos insisted that Damien's faithfulness until his death on April 15, 1889, cannot be explained by strength of character and tenacity alone, but by a concrete spirituality: that of the Heart of Jesus, which draws near to the untouchable, and that of the Heart of Mary, which remains beside suffering without ever abandoning it. Vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that, far from being mere juridical formulas, sustained Damien through the hardest moments on Molokai, even when leprosy touched his own body in 1884.
The talk closed with a question that Fr. Tinjacá left resonating among the participants of the Poitiers Session: where are the Molokais of today, who are today's excluded, and what wounds of humanity are still waiting for a humble, faithful, and concrete presence?
We then celebrated the Eucharist at the Parish of Saint Damien of Molokai in Tremelo, presided over by Enrique Ramírez Capetillo sscc, who, drawing on the Sunday liturgy, invited us to reflect on an element that is also present in our own vocational history: crisis in following Jesus. In the midst of such crises, "Jesus tells us today that we are all soil, we are all seed, and we are all sowers."
Before the day came to a close, brothers and sisters shared about their own vocational journeys.
07/13/2026