Jozef De Veuster, better known to Catholics by the religious name he chose - Damien - was canonized on Sunday by Pope Benedict XVL. The ceremony, which conferred upon De Veuster the title of "saint", took place in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, 120 years after the priest’s death from leprosy in 1889.

Born in Belgium in 1840, De Veuester’s ministry, assigned at his request, was in Hawaii on the island of Molokai where he tended to the needs of some 600-800 lepers who were quarantined there. The government provided food and clothing assistance for those infected with the loathsome disease, but little else. Father Damien not only administered the "consolations of religion" to those in the colony, but also provided what little medical attention he could, treating their ulcers, even building coffins and digging their graves. He was a builder of roads, schools, a church and a hospital. He was considered tough, even headstrong, by his peers, but was, and is, venerated on the little-visited Hawaiian island. Of the newly canonized saint, the Pontiff said yesterday:

Saint Damien chose to be among those considered the most "repugnant" of outcasts, eventually giving his life in caring for them.

"I WANT TO GO WHERE THE MONSTERS GO"

When as a teenager Michael Wayne Hutchinson took the surname of his adoptive father, he also changed his first name to Damien, allegedly after the leper priest he came to admire during a fleeting but intense interest in Catholicism. Knowing the loneliness and separateness that characterized the life of Damien Echols, it isn’t hard to see how he could have come to admire, and eventually take the name of, the Patron Saint of Molokai who sacrificed his life for the ultimate misfits. Over the years, many have asserted that Echols’s choice of a name was something more sinister, possibly deriving from a character in Richard Donner’s 1976 film The Omen. In it, five-year-old Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens), the heir apparent to a British family’s diplomatic and financial dynasty, is depicted as the coming antichrist, or Great Beast, of the apocalyptic biblical book of Revelation. The antichrist of the bible has "the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666." (Revelation 13:18) The arrival of the antichrist foretells the return of Jesus on earth and the ensuing battle of Armageddon. In the film, when told by the enigmatic Carl Bugenhagen that the boy must bear "the mark" somewhere on his body, Damien’s father, Robert Thorn, searches for the mark, and eventually finds it in the form of a birthmark on the young Thorn’s scalp. Armed with the seven daggers of Meggado, all Thorn has to do is kill his son.

Damien Echols was plagued with chronic depression - or more accurately "dysthymia syndrome", as it was diagnosed - throughout his youth. His home environment, dominated by a man Damien once described as "the most hateful individual I’ve ever known", was characterized by extreme poverty, emotional instability, religious extremism, and the sexual abuse of his sister by Jack Echols. His mother was unable, or unwilling, to stop what was happening to her children. Damien became increasingly antisocial as he grew older, and began to develop what he describes as a defense mechanism for protecting himself against others he deemed threatening. Dark goth clothes including his signature black trench coat, fingernails filed to points, and an open obsession with heavy metal music were enough to convince many in West Memphis that Damien Echols was someone best left alone. These things, along with Echols’s assertion that he was involved in "witchcraft" - not, he insisted, black witchcraft or Satanism - convinced many that the choice of Echols’s new name may have sprung from a more malevolent motive than the mimicry of a future saint. Echols described to his therapist his disassociation with society, his interest in witchcraft, and a near obsession with death and the afterlife. He also told tales of blood drinking, which he claimed gave him power and made him "feel like a god." His poetry, which his therapist encouraged him to bring to their sessions, was often brimming with death and anger:

So the question is, from where did Damien Echols actually draw his new name? Was he attempting to honor the father-figure saint who might serve to protect him from evil, like some sort of personal gargoyle? Or did he wish to embody the evil and power of a bloodthirsty demon, bent on becoming someone who "influenced the world", someone who would be remembered, perhaps as the West Memphis Boogeyman?