By Patrick Downes

There will be no Sisters of the Holy Family here next year to celebrate the order’s 60th anniversary of their arrival in the islands. Sister Elizabeth Murray, the last Holy Family Sister serving in Hawaii, left last week.

Suffering from an unidentified ailment that makes walking painfully difficult, Sister Elizabeth has been asked by her order to leave her job at Annunciation Parish in Waimea on the Big Island and return to the motherhouse in Fremont, Calif., where she can receive proper care and therapy.

She said aloha on Aug. 15, two days after the parish threw her a poignant farewell party.

Her departure brings to a close a stretch of religious service unique to the Big Island — a ministry of parish-based sisters who served people found outside the margins of typical Catholic institutions — the schools, hospitals and social service agencies.

As Annunciation Parish’s director of religious education, Sister Elizabeth remained true to her community’s calling.

She rounded up 50-or-so public school kids in Waikoloa in a borrowed Protestant church hall across the street from the school every Wednesday afternoon for catechism classes.

She started a youth group to keep teens connected with the church during those vaporous years after confirmation and before adulthood.

She succeeded in bringing college students back to help out the younger kids with talks, retreats and trips to the beach.

And she recruited, trained and — with in her own quiet, gentle way — retained lay catechists.

The pastor, Maryknoll Father Robert Wynn, was grateful when she came to his parish in 1998.

When it came to religious education, he admitted, he had been “winging it.”

“When sister came, things completely changed,” he said. “Here you had a professional.”

56 years a religious

Sister Elizabeth Murray was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been in religious life 56 years.

Along the way she earned two master’s degrees, one in religious education from Seattle University, the other in education administration from the University of San Francisco.

She spent the decade of the 1970s as dean of Holy Family College in Fremont, a small college serving the area’s religious communities and “people interested in pursuing work in the church.”

From 1986 to 1992, she worked at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in East Palo Alto, a poor community south of San Francisco. There her job as director of religious education encompassed a lot more than catechism classes.

She would spend much of her day visiting the homes of the parish’s mostly minority families, including the immigrant Tongans and Hispanics who were then moving into the area. Her parish was engaged in community organizing efforts, teaching English and fighting drug use and sexual abuse.

Sister Elizabeth came to Hawaii in 1992 and was stationed in Honokaa, at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, smack dab in the middle of Hamakua Coast’s sugar plantations which at the time were shutting down their operations. There teaching catechism overlapped work with the diocese’s Hawaii Island Social Ministry which had its hands full helping newly jobless agricultural workers.

In 1998, Sister Elizabeth moved to neighboring Annunciation Parish in paniolo country where she greatly expanded the catechetical and parish youth programs.

Her influence was island-wide and even diocese-wide as she helped organize annual Big Island Youth Days and adult Enrichment Days, and served on the diocesan Youth Board and as an island liaison for the diocesan Department of Religious Education.

The new diocesan director of religious education, Jayne Mondoy, had worked with Sister Elizabeth for only a year, but considers herself fortunate for the experience.

She likened any conversation with a “person of that caliber” as “sitting at the feet of my elders.”

“She impressed me as a person she who fully, truly lives her theology,” Mondoy said.

“There is a gentleness, a welcoming about her,” she said, coupled with a quiet perseverance.

Mondoy said the island’s religious educational coordinators, youth ministers and catechists “all have a strong sense of community, collaboration, and cohesiveness” thanks to Sister Elizabeth.

“That’s a very challenging thing to accomplish,” she said.

“What we do is all about the people we serve,” Mondoy said. “In that way, her vision and her spirit and energy are reflected in the people she served.”

Thanks to her contributions, Mondoy said, “our faith life on the Big Island is going to be sustained for another generation.”

The perfect field for their calling

The Holy Family Sisters were founded in San Francisco in the late 1800s to evangelize those who fell outside the reach of normal Catholic institutions. They catechized public school children, trained adult catechists, and visited the sick, lonely and elderly in their homes.

The Big Island of Hawaii was the perfect field for their particular calling. Unlike the other major islands, where a good percentage of parishes had parochial schools, the Big Island only had one, in Hilo. Its other 12 parishes and 11 missions were generally small and far flung. The population was clustered in small towns, plantation communities and ranches.

Bishop of Honolulu James J. Sweeney, surveying the needs of his diocese soon after the end of World War II, realized the best group to serve the Big Island would be the community he knew well from his hometown San Francisco.

At the bishop’s invitation, six Holy Family Sisters arrived in Honokaa in 1947 to teach along the Hamakua coast and north and south Kohala. The sisters soon expanded with convents in Mountain View in 1950, Kona in 1955 and Honolulu in 1966. On the Big Island, they worked in all the parishes outside of Hilo. On Oahu they served at St. George Parish in Waimanalo, Blessed Sacrament in Pauoa, and Our Lady of the Mount in Kalihi Valley.

Their service inspired seven local vocations to their order, though only one remains today.

Sister Elizabeth was witness to the Holy Family Sisters final declining decade here. She saw convents close in Mountain View, Honokaa and Kona. She saw her community members slowly leave, an average of one a year, until finally the unexpected death of Sister Hilaria Marie Dawal on Oahu in 2003 left her by herself.

“I feel sad that I am the last Holy Family Sister,” she said.

She offered a litany of things she will remember of her 14 years in Hawaii.

“I’m going to remember the goodness of the people, the sense of hospitality, the deep faith that our youth have, and their sense of prayer that they are not given credit for,” she said.

“I am going to remember the very dedicated priests I have worked with; the beautiful scenery and the ocean; the little kids, so open and so surprising in the things that they say, their innate sense of God.”

“I’m really going to miss the people here,” she said. “The good, good people.”

You may write Sister Elizabeth Murray at Holy Family Motherhouse, P.O. Box 2248, Fremont, CA 94539.