Joseph Dutton arrived at Kalaupapa in 1886 with words that would define him forever: "I have come to help, and I have come to stay." And so it was: for 44 years he cared for Hansen's disease patients in the isolated Hawaiian settlement of Molokai. This past April, Hawaii Governor Josh Green signed into law the designation of April 27 as Brother Joseph Dutton Day, a civil recognition that joins the honour already granted by the Catholic Church when his cause for canonisation was submitted to the Vatican in 2024.
His personal story is one of radical conversion. Born in Vermont in 1843, Dutton survived the American Civil War only to fall into a decade of alcoholism and aimlessness. At the age of 40 he made a complete turnaround: he converted to Catholicism, took the name Joseph, and spent twenty months in a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It was there that he read about the work of Father Damien de Veuster and decided to join him in Molokai.
The bond between the two men is deeply moving. When Damien, already gravely ill with Hansen's disease, knew he was dying, he entrusted Dutton with responsibility for the orphans' home he had founded, saying with profound confidence: "I can die now. Brother Joseph will take care of my orphans." Dutton not only honoured that charge but expanded it: the home grew into the Baldwin Home for Boys, a complex of 45 buildings caring for more than 140 sick children and young men, with schools, dormitories, a library and workshops.
Over the course of his life he cared for approximately 1,400 boys, in a place where patients' life expectancy was only 8 to 10 years. Like Damien before him, he freely chose to share that world of suffering and confinement without being sick himself, and from that remote corner of the world he corresponded with Presidents of the United States and received visits from writers such as Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.
One of the last residents of Kalaupapa, before dying this past May, wished to publicly thank him for his "selfless and dedicated service to our people." Today they rest together in Kalaupapa, alongside the nearly 8,000 patients who once filled that place of suffering — and, remarkably, of life.
Damien planted the seed. Dutton watered it for nearly half a century.
06/17/2026