The Spanish publisher PPC has just released "Santo, santo, santo" ("Holy, Holy, Holy"), the new book by Professor José Miguel Peiro Alba, with a foreword by Fernando Cordero sscc. The book offers a journey through the lives of various saints as a mirror for one's own search for meaning, and devotes its entire twelfth chapter to the figure of Saint Damien of Molokai.
The chapter, titled "Saint Damien of Molokai: the Apostle of the Lepers," opens with a brief biographical overview: the birth of Jozef De Veuster in Tremelo, Belgium, in 1840; his entry into the novitiate of the Sacred Hearts; his departure as a missionary to Hawaii to replace his ill older brother; and his voluntary offer to go to the island of Molokai, where those suffering from leprosy were confined. There he contracted the disease in 1885 and died in 1889, devoted to his mission until the very end.
Building on this biography, the author develops several spiritual themes. In "My Place in the World," he presents Damien as an example of someone who finds his vocation in what seemed like a "Plan B": he was not born a missionary, still less a missionary to lepers, yet it was precisely on that unforeseen path that he found his place. From this arises a twofold insight: that the evangelical life consists in discovering that to lose is to gain, and that to live is to give oneself for others, "like the grain of wheat that dies to bear fruit."
In "Solidarity: From I to We," the chapter recalls how Damien, upon arriving in Molokai, introduced himself to the sick by saying "we lepers," fully identifying with them even before he himself was infected. The author turns this gesture into a call to identify today's "leprosies" and to live solidarity not as an option, but as a demand of our common humanity.
The chapter closes with "This Is My Body, Given Up for You," a eucharistic reading of Damien's self-giving: his own admission that, without the Eucharist, his mission would have been unbearable is presented as the source of an incarnate spirituality, one made of closeness, contact, and self-gift for others.
"Santo, santo, santo" (PPC Editorial, 2026) is now available, offering, through the witness of Saint Damien of Molokai, a new opportunity to make known the charism of the Sacred Hearts and the figure of one of its most emblematic saints.
Link: https://www.ppc-editorial.com/libro/santo-santo-santo
07/05/2026