In front of the capitol is a highly stylized statue of Father Damien, the Belgian priest who lived and worked with victims of Hansen’s disease who were exiled to the island of Molokaʻi during the late 19th century, before later dying of the disease himself. In 2009 the Catholic Church canonized Father Damien as Hawaii’s first saint after the allegedly miraculous recovery from cancer in 1988 of a Honolulu schoolteacher who had prayed over Damien’s original grave site on Molokaʻi.
