Many had long considered Father Damien a saint.

Today, in a ceremony in St. Peter's Square, the Roman Catholic Church made it official.

For Catholics, the honor is a singular one — an affirmation of a holy life, the recognition of a modern Christian hero.

But many non-Catholics are rejoicing, too: taking inspiration or pride or strength from Damien's remarkable story.

"We live in a world with so few heroes, examples of what we can be," said Father Herman Gomes, of St. Ann's Church in Kane'ohe, who has been giving talks on Damien since 1994 to churches and school groups. "He is the model. You look at a life of dedication and perseverance, how can you not be inspired, amazed and spurred on to do that for yourself?"

It was 136 years ago that the Sacred Hearts father volunteered to be part of a rotation of four young priests who would minister to hundreds of Hansen's disease patients in Kalaupapa, Moloka'i. Damien was told he would stay for three months. He stayed for 16 years, helping to tend to the sick, celebrating Masses and improving conditions at the remote settlement with oftentimes intensive labor.

As Kalaupapa's only resident priest, he built coffins, dug graves and delivered funeral services.

In his first two years at the settlement, where the government quarantined patients for the remainder of their lives, he buried some 200 parishioners.

The Belgian priest, always handy with tools, also helped to construct a church, hospital and water system in Kalaupapa.

He was, not long after taking his post, a community leader and a beloved friend to many.

"I am not a relative by marriage or blood, but I am his daughter in spirit," said Hansen's disease patient Mele Meheula, according to a new book, "Father Damien ... 'A bit of taro, a piece of fish and a glass of water,' " which tells Kalaupapa's story through the voices of residents. Patient Joseph Manu said of Damien, "He was my spiritual father and my friend."

CALL FOR CANONIZATION

Damien died in Kalaupapa at age 49, on April 15, 1889, four years after being diagnosed with Hansen's disease himself.

When word of his death reached first the Mainland and then Europe, thousands mourned.

A rallying cry for his canonization quickly erupted. The London Times wrote that Damien had earned "both his rest and a beatification, which no probation of 60 years is needed to confirm." Londoners hurried to buy copies of a photograph of Damien taken on his deathbed, and when they were displayed in Birmingham storefronts, "so many people came to crowd against the shop windows that police had to be called to clear the streets," writes Gavan Daws in "Holy Man," a Damien biography.

The Honolulu Advertiser reported Damien's death April 22, when word came by ship.

The paper said Damien gained "worldwide fame for devoting his life to ministrations among the inmates" of Kalaupapa.

Damien's formal cause for sainthood was not introduced until 1955.

It would take 40 more years for Father Damien to be beatified, taking on the title "blessed" — one step from sainthood.

Long before that, people around the globe had embraced his message of compassion. In 1971, Gandhi said Father Damien was one of his inspirations. "The political and journalistic world can boast of very few heroes who compare with Father Damien of Moloka'i," Gandhi said, in an account on Hansen's disease in India. "It is worthwhile to look for the sources of such heroism."

Schools, churches and organizations have also used Damien as a namesake to honor the priest and his life's work.

The Damien Institute in India was founded in 1983 and helps Hansen's disease patients. The Damien Center, which was founded in 1987 in Indianapolis, is the largest HIV/AIDS organization in Indiana and is a leader in education and prevention. On its Web site, it says of Damien that he "battled the religious and societal rejection of Hansen's disease victims, living with and among them."

DAMIEN'S EARLY YEARS

Damien was born in 1840 in Tremelo, Belgium, the seventh of eight children.

He grew up with expectations that he would take over the family farm. But as a young man, he was drawn to religion.

In a letter to his parents while away at school in Braine-le-Comte, where he had been sent to learn French, Damien asked permission to join the priesthood. "Without being sure you are content, I would not dare to commit myself to such a state," he wrote. He continued that "we must choose the state God has predestined for us, so as to be happy in the next life."

Damien joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts in 1859, becoming Brother Damien.

He was just 24 in March 1864, when he arrived in Honolulu Harbor aboard a three-masted ship, the R.W. Wood. He had traveled from Bremerhaven, Germany — a voyage that took 148 days and included no port stops — taking the place of his older brother, Father Pamphile, who fell ill with typhus during an outbreak in Louvain, Belgium, and was not able to make the trip to the Islands.

Damien was ordained shortly after his arrival in Honolulu, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.

Within a few months, he was assigned to the Big Island, first to the Puna district and later to Kohala.

He spent nine years on the Big Island, making long treks between communities to see parishioners.

The difficult work helped prepare him for his biggest challenge — life in Kalaupapa.

LIFE IN KALAUPAPA

Damien arrived in the settlement at 33 years old, still a picture of health.

What he saw there has been the stuff of books, a feature film and documentaries: the deplorable conditions, the immense suffering, the horrors and the hopelessness of a makeshift community whose inhabitants were wrenched from their families and sent away to die.

"From morning to night, I am amidst heartbreaking physical and moral misery," Father Damien wrote from Kalaupapa in late 1874 — one year after arriving in the settlement. "Still, I try to appear almost gay, so as to raise the courage of my patients."

When Damien got to Kalaupapa, an estimated 924 Hansen's disease patients lived in the settlement.

"Between his arrival and death ... another 2,835 people would be taken from everything they held dear and sent to Kalaupapa on the premise that society needed to be protected at all costs," wrote Henry and Anwei Law, in the "Father Damien" book published earlier this year, adding that Father Damien shared a special bond with the patients because he knew what it was to be separated for life from loved ones.

When he left Belgium for his assignment in the Pacific, he wrote to his parents, "Henceforward we shall not have the happiness of seeing one another, but we shall always be united by that tender love which we bear to one another."

As he predicted, Father Damien never did make it home during his lifetime. He was buried in a place of his choosing — under the lauhala tree where he spent his first night in Kalaupapa. In 1936, his remains were moved to Louvain, Belgium, not far from his childhood home.