Author photo of Jack Kiyonaga

Jack Kiyonaga

Jack Kiyonaga is a writer and journalist. Raised in Washington, D.C., and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he spent the past three years living in his great-grandmother's house in Molokai, Hawaii, and running the island's only newspaper, The Molokai Dispatch.

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Joseph Dutton in 1921 (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)

Hawaii's new Brother Joseph Dutton Day honors layman's care for Hansen's disease patients

In addition to his state recognition, the sainthood cause for Joseph Dutton, who watched over the orphaned boys of Kalaupapa Hansen's disease settlement for 44 years, has been submitted to the Vatican.

A view of the Virginia State Capitol building in Richmond in 2017 (Wikimedia Commons/Famartin)

Virginia decriminalizes suicide. Some Catholics say this is complicated.

A recently passed bill decriminalizing suicide in Virginia has been championed by many as overdue relief for families of those who have died by suicide, but it also raises questions from a Catholic ethical perspective.

Grave markers are pictured in a file photo in Kalaupapa on Molokai, Hawaii, where Hansen's disease patients quarantined there for life were cared for by Sts. Damien de Veuster and Marianne Cope. An estimated 8,000 people are buried there. (OSV News/Courtesy of Hawaii Catholic Herald)

Kalaupapa, site of Catholic saint history, reopens to visitors

Kalaupapa in Hawaii was a settlement where people with Hansen's disease, or leprosy, were quarantined. Two saints spent years serving those exiled there. COVID-19 closed Kalaupapa to the public, but it is now reopened.

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