Brother Joseph Dutton . . . Why He Is — Or Should Be — A Saint For Now

By PEGGY MOEN

In an iconic photo, Brother Joseph Dutton emerges from an inside, U.S. flag-festooned doorway. Two boys, both wearing hats and both noticeably disfigured, are seated in the room Dutton is entering.
The caption from the Hawaii State Archives says simply, “Brother Joseph Dutton, late in life.”

Joseph Dutton (1843-1931) was a layperson, not a brother in the sense of belonging to a religious order. He did study to be a Trappist at Gethsemani in Kentucky, but decided he was meant for an active, not a contemplative, vocation. A convert to Catholicism, baptized in 1883 at age 40, at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Memphis, Tenn., this divorced recovered alcoholic spent the latter half of his almost-88 years as a volunteer at the Molokai leper settlement. He was inspired to go there when he read an article in a Catholic magazine about Fr. Damien’s heroic labors.
Damien dubbed him “Brother” upon his arrival at the leper settlement in 1886, twenty years after the Hawaiian government first banished leprosy victims to the Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai. Damien died on April 15, 1889, with Brother Dutton assuming many of his responsibilities. Dutton worked at the Boy’s Home, which became The Baldwin Home for Boys and which he eventually ran.
Now, in the midst of our two national calamities, civil unrest, marked by burning flags and mangled statues, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Brother Dutton makes a great patron saint, though he is not yet canonized.
Born in Stowe, Vt., Dutton was a Union Civil War veteran, serving as an officer in the Thirteenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. That accounts for his love of country and his love of the U.S. flag.
The website Emerging Civil War says:
“Dutton was proud of his wartime service and never hesitated to display his patriotism while on Molokai. He erected a flag pole outside his small cottage and flew the Stars and Stripes. As part of his daily ritual, he raised the flag at daybreak and lowered in at nightfall.”
Eva K. Belz in Yankee at Molokai says the Grand Army of the Republic sent Brother Dutton a flag every year. In turn, shortly before World War I, Dutton sent one of his extra flags to St. Peter’s in Memphis, his home parish. That flag was demobilized after World War I.
Dutton was what some might now call a “flag-waver,” by way of answer to those now burning flags and defacing and destroying statues of national heroes, up to and including George Washington. On the evening of Independence Day, a crowd in Sacramento tore down a statue of St. Junipero Serra, setting it on fire and beating it. This is the third Serra statue to be destroyed by mobs in California.
We can imagine what pain all this would cause Brother Dutton.
But his life also symbolizes national reconciliation. Though a Northerner, he remained in the South after the Civil War. This Union veteran’s godmother, Jorantha (Mrs. Benedict) Semmes of Memphis, was married to the cousin of Raphael Semmes, the Confederate admiral.
The National Park Service biography (nps.gov/kala/learn/historyculture/joseph-dutton.htm) of Dutton says he was once “a functioning alcoholic,” but notes that he swore off alcohol in 1876 and always kept his pledge. He was considered “functioning” while he still drank because he held down jobs. One was finding the unburied Union dead in the South and helping to move them to a burial site now known as the National Cemetery.
Brother Dutton was matter-of-fact about the way of all flesh. In a July 26, 1889 letter to Miss Elizabeth Harper of Brooklyn, N.Y., he said of his work in the leper settlement: “Yet I find no repugnance, no great trial. You doubtless have greater ones. To be sure the life is given eventually, and the body to rottenness, but it must rot anyway.”
He also wrote that he saw his being on Molokai as “my special vocation” and what led up to it as “clearly the action of Divine Providence in my behalf.” In the letter, he cautioned Miss Harper “against having too high an estimate of the work here. . . . One’s Molokai can be anywhere.” Dutton stressed that he was performing “the penance I ought.”
While Dutton was therefore a man of great faith, he still took heed of the natural means of preventing infection with disease. Gavan Daws, in his definitive Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai (1973), described Brother Dutton as “a formidable soaper and scrubber.”
Which is something we are all encouraged to be during COVID-19!
He is a great saint for our troubled times not only because of his love of country and his ability to cope with an epidemic, but for a couple of other reasons as well.
His being a layperson makes him a fitting “saint for our time,” the “Age of the Laity,” and efforts on behalf of his canonization are underway. Fr. Damien and Mother Marianne Cope — the two other principal Catholic missionaries on Molokai — were both members of religious orders and have been canonized, Damien in 2009 and Marianne in 2012.
According to the Hawaii Catholic Herald, July 31, 2015: “On June 23, [Honolulu] Bishop Larry Silva approved the statutes of the Joseph Dutton Guild, identified in church terms as a ‘Private Association of the Faithful with Juridic Personality,’ with the mission of spreading knowledge of and devotion to Ira ‘Brother Joseph’ Dutton, as well as addressing the financial and logistical needs for his cause for sainthood.
“The guild evolved from and replaces the less formal Joseph Dutton Committee, which the bishop had convened a few years ago with people interested in promoting the Dutton cause.”
Catholic World Report wrote on February 24, 2020: “During his recent ad limina visit to the Holy See, Diocese of Honolulu Bishop Larry Silva met with Congregation for the Causes of Saints official Msgr. Robert Sarno to discuss the possible beatification cause of Brother Joseph Dutton of Molokai.”
As is true of so many lives now, Dutton’s for a time turned into a mess. His wife’s serial adultery, ruinous spending, and eventual desertion with another man precipitated his drinking problem. Dutton once estimated that he drank about a barrel of whiskey a year, prior to his taking the pledge. He finally filed for divorce from his wife in 1881, after long hoping for reconciliation, to no avail.
Many people are living through the pandemic and the national upheaval in the midst of personal crises. Brother Dutton can help them, by prayer and example.
And if Dutton was a flag waver, at one time the U.S. flag saluted him. When the Great White Fleet came to Hawaii in 1908, Admiral Charles Sperry, as ordered by President Theodore Roosevelt, went by Molokai and the ships dipped their colors to salute the patriotic brother and his mission.
Brother Dutton died in a hospital in Honolulu on March 26, 1931 and is buried on Molokai at St. Philomena Catholic Church Cemetery.
On August 15, 2013, Molokai’s St. Joseph Church in Kamalo put into place a seven-foot, 2,000 pound statue of Brother Joseph Dutton.
Long may it stand!
(If any readers have any relevant information about Dutton’s life or about devotion to him, they may send it to the Diocese of Honolulu: josephdutton@rcchawaii.org. Also, I am interested in receiving any available background material on Dutton at editorial@thewandererpress.com.)