How to Portray a Martyr?

Father Joseph Damien de Veuster has been a storm center of controversy in Hawaii for the better part of a century. A Belgian-born Roman Catholic priest seeking converts, he was greeted with hostility by Hawaii's ruling Protestant-missionary families from the moment he arrived in Honolulu in 1864. He eventually volunteered to serve the leper colony on Molokai, became a beloved, if eccentric figure there; he wore a flowered native dress under his cape, tied up the brim of his battered clerical hat with string. At the age of 49, he died of leprosy, or Hansen's disease.

So widespread became his fame after his death that a move was started to have him canonized in Rome. And when Hawaii was asked to contribute statues of two of its heroes to the Capitol's Statuary Hall in Washington, he and the 19th century Hawaiian King Kamehameha were the nearly unanimous choices. A statue of Kamehameha presented no problem: one is already standing before the state judicial building; all the legislature needed to do was order up a replica.

For a statue of Father Damien, a seven-man commission solicited models from seven different sculptors. The one they approved, by a 5-to-2 vote, was a wood-and-wax model by Marisol Escobar, the whimsical Venezuelan pop-doll maker. Her model, based on photos of Father Damien taken toward the end of his life, shows his features graphically distorted by the disease that killed him. "I liked him when he was older," she explained. "He had really accomplished something then."

But to the minority, Marisol's version was "shocking." They favored an idealized version of Father Damien as a young man with a tiny child clutching at his knee, submitted by Sculptor Nathan Cabot Hale. The Hawaiian House of Representatives voted to back Hale's model, and the whole Hawaiian archipelago began taking sides.

Snorted the Honolulu Advertiser:

"The Hale statue could be anybody, Bing Crosby, Pat Boone, or even House Speaker Elmer Cravalho." Asked one Protestant minister who favored the Marisol: "Would we take statues of the mutilated body of Christ out of churches and destroy them just because they look so horrible?" The Senate responded to the uproar by authorizing $73,350 to make not one, but two 7-ft. casts of Marisol's Damien. Hawaii, said the Senate resolution, will be judged by the "maturity of its civilization." The Marisol version "will impress the viewer not only with the temperament, character and greatness of the man it represents, but also provide an unforgettable visual experience." Apparently persuaded, the House last week backtracked and, hours before adjournment, voted 37 to 14 to send Marisol's Father Damien to Washington.

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