Years ago, when the excellent actress Mia Farrow had her stormy split with Woody Allen, it was reported that she had returned to the Catholic Church, in which she was raising her many children, most of them adopted.

Why did she do this? I think I have a clue. While browsing through my personal library the other night, I ran across a book I’d never gotten around to reading, by a one-time Hollywood director. The book was Damien the Leper; the author, John Farrow. Mia’s father.

The basic story is well known. In the 19th century, Fr. Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest born in 1840, was given permission to go to the Sandwich Islands (as Captain Cook named Hawaii), where, with astounding courage, diligence, heroism, and sanctity, he ministered to a leper colony. Shortly after his death in 1889, he was venomously slandered by a Protestant minister named Charles McEwen Hyde, who had praised him lavishly only four years earlier. Now Hyde accused Damien of several sins, including loose relations with women, and blamed his death from leprosy on his own “vices and carelessness.” Hyde even denied him any credit for improving the lot of the lepers in the colony.

Reading Hyde’s words now, one is reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s smear of Mother Teresa, complete with the gratuitous lewd innuendo.

Hyde’s lies, printed in a Sydney newspaper, provoked a furious and crushing response from Robert Louis Stevenson, which Farrow quotes in full in chapter XVII of his book, to stunning effect. Stevenson’s renowned defense of the holy man stands as a classic refutation of an incredibly foul attack, calling the world’s attention to the merits of the intended victim; and it would be Hyde’s only claim to fame today, had not Stevenson (by coincidence!) named the monstrous title character of one of his most famous stories “Mr. Hyde” in 1886.

At any rate, something tells me that Damien’s story and Stevenson’s role in it, as recounted in John Farrow’s book, made a deep impression, many years later, on Farrow’s daughter.