One planned Waikiki construction project won’t add to the high-rise hotels and condo towers that define the skyline of Hawaii’s largest resort destination.

St. Augustine by-the-sea Catholic Church, which has graced Waikiki for more than 160 years, is expanding its Kalakaua Avenue footprint with a new museum honoring Hawaii’s two saints.

After seven years of planning, the church recently was awarded a permit for a $25 million-plus project, which will include a Damien and Marianne of Molokai Museum. Both served thousands of Hansen’s disease patients quarantined in settlements at Kalaupapa, Molokai.

This will be the first U.S. museum dedicated to St. Damien, although there are others in his native Belgium. It also will provide a different experience for devotees of St. Marianne Cope, who already has a museum in her honor in Syracuse, N.Y.

St. Damien, a priest with the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, was canonized in Rome in 2009. The canonization for St. Marianne, who was a Sister of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, took place three years later.

The new two-story, 32-foot-high museum will feature 5,500 square feet of floor space fronting Kalakaua Avenue. The interior design will mirror St. Philomena Church in Kalaupapa, which St. Damien expanded to accommodate the growing needs of his congregation. The story of the two saints will unfold through virtual and interactive exhibits, and there will be space for archives and a gift shop.

The church is still negotiating with St. Marianne’s order for exhibit material, but visitors are assured of seeing artifacts like St. Damien’s prayer book and the letters that he wrote to his religious superiors, family and Hawaiian royalty. Tools that he used for building homes and churches also will be displayed.

The project also will include demolition and replacement of the church’s circa-1960s parish hall and back parking lot. A new multipurpose building and parking deck will encompass a 17,775-square-foot area. The first three floors of the structure are designated for storage and parking, which will grow from 34 to 113 stalls. The fourth floor will house a new parish hall, a small stage, a large covered lanai, meeting rooms, offices, bathrooms and a kitchen.

Construction is slated to start in 2017.

The Rev. Lane Akiona, who grew up on Molokai and now leads the Waikiki church, said public meetings begin next month to provide updates. Akiona said church members, visitors and other supporters have raised enough money to pay for construction, but more funds are needed to complete the inside and to pay for ongoing operations.

Parishes usually fund the bulk of capital campaigns, but Deacon Andy Calunod said the number of tourists who support St. Augustine changed that assumption.

“If you were to look at raw statistics, you would wonder how a large church with a small parish base is able to survive,” said Calunod, who has served the church for 10 years. “There must be something here more powerful than numbers.”

Akiona said the parish has 900 registered households, but only about 250 provide support and three-fourths are individuals over age 75.

“We’re very blessed that donations have come in from many generous people who love the story of St. Damien and St. Marianne and want to see it become much more public,” he said.

The church will use museum donations and funds from renting space in its new multipurpose building to subsidize operations. It also will seek global support from organizations and parishes affiliated with the saints.

It will beef up its online donor program and install an electronic giving kiosk — the first of its kind at a church in Hawaii — so that parishioners and visitors can make donations using credit or debit cards.

“The giving kiosk was used successfully in a Florida parish with a high number of visitors,” Calunod said. “I have high hopes for what it will help us accomplish here. It is the purpose of this church to serve in the footsteps of St. Damien and St. Marianne.”

Akiona said the modern museum will surpass the church’s former heritage center, which housed information about the saints in a small rental space above an ABC Store. The church ran the heritage center for about four years, but Akiona said it closed about a year and a half ago when rent soared beyond $12,000 a month.

Calunod said the success of the modest center provided a glimpse into the benefits of a larger museum.

“We had about 40,000 visitors come through the center and gift shop sales were about $100,000 a year. We have one of the greatest resources to be here in Waikiki. People come all of the time and they are looking for something,” he said.

Sister Cheryl Wint, a member of St. Marianne’s order assigned to St. Augustine, said there was spiritual demand for the heritage center.

“A lot of people grew up with the stories of these saints. It’s wonderful for them to be in Hawaii and see the pictures and relics. We had lots of people who came in asking the saints to intercede for them,” Wint said.

Like the center, the museum will serve a healing purpose for the many Hawaii residents who were traumatized by Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy, and the involuntary confinement law in effect from 1866 to 1969. Babies born to settlement patients were taken away to be adopted by healthy family members or placed in orphanages.

“A grandmother brought her daughter and granddaughter to the museum. The grandmother shared that she was born on Kalaupapa and sent away,” Wint said. “She took in each picture very deeply. She was searching for her parents.”

Sister Rose Annette Ahuna, who grew up in Hilo and served as a national park volunteer in Kalaupapa from 2009 to 2013, said the museum will help local people connect to a painful chapter of history that wasn’t discussed enough.

“Many of us who are from the islands never even knew of Kalaupapa. Leprosy at the time was hush-hush,” said Ahuna, who now resides at St. Francis Convent in Manoa. “I was shocked when I arrived and saw all the graves, thousands of them. I feel we should educate the youngsters. I’m glad the museum will be enlarged.”

Sister Frances Therese Souza, who spent 22 years at the settlement nursing in the footsteps of St. Marianne, said the museum also honors the courage of the patients.

“When I went there in 1989 there were 99 patients; quite a few had deformities that could not be cured by medicine because it was too late. … We need a museum to keep the spirits alive to educate people about what happened back there,” said Souza, also at St. Francis Convent.

Souza, who was the last sister to take care of patients at the settlement, said St. Marianne inspired her.

“I think that’s the everlasting legacy that she and St. Damien left,” she said. “Anyone hearing about their story can be inspired to say, ‘I can do something positive in this world. Look at what they did and look at what they had to put up with.’”

Wint said the museum will be a place where miracles happen. She has heard stories from visitors who experienced divine intervention at the center and expects to hear more as the museum draws even larger crowds.

She recalls a time when a woman visited the center and bought a religious medal. Shortly after, Wint said the woman’s brother was seriously injured surfing.

“She took the medal to him. The next day, he woke up, which was not predicted, and she attributed it to the intercession of the saints,” she said.

“People are looking for a truth beyond their experience,” she said. “I think this is a place where they can find it.”