The spirit of Blessed Marianne

The strength and enthusiasm of Hawaii’s first Franciscan Sister endure in those who follow in her footsteps

By Lisa Benoit

Sister Richard Marie Toal

For Sister Richard Marie Toal, making her first vows as a Franciscan in Utica, N.Y., at the “older” age of 21, becoming a nurse and serving on Kalaupapa for 40 years was not a conscious act of following in the footsteps of Mother Marianne. Nor did she even strive to be like her famous predecessor from Syracuse.

But at 89 years old, the small, blue-eyed Irish woman is one of the many Franciscan sisters who have been faithfully praying for Mother Marianne’s beatification and canonization.

“I don’t think she had much of an influence growing up,” she said. “But since, I have said a prayer every day for her in hopes that she would be canonized.”

Sister Richard Marie was born and raised in New Jersey. Her parents died before she turned eight and she spent a year and a half in an orphanage before her grandparents brought her to live with them and her younger brother.

She has two prescient memories of her father, one of him bringing her to church for First Communion instructions, and another of him teaching her how to fish with a tree branch with a hook tied to the end. Both would be relived in her adult life.

She said her grandfather was a “nice old man” who nevertheless would not let her join the Franciscans. She waited until she was 21 and then joined with two friends.

“We entered on the second of February,” she said.

The Toal children were all similarly influenced by their faith. Two of her three brothers entered the priesthood and her sister also entered the convent.

After serving a number of years as a nurse in Syracuse, Sister Richard Marie requested of her superiors to go to Kalaupapa.

Ten years later, when she was in her 40s, she got her permission. She said that she also took instantly to the people and enjoyed their humor and love.

“They would give you the shirt off their back,” she said.

Many of her free hours were spent fishing along the calm shoreline.

“The older ones were really rascals,” she said of the children she took care of. “They would have me going in circles and they would laugh— they thought it was so funny. It was hard when we were trying to give them medicine.”

One evening, a patient came to her and told her he was going to die by morning and asked her to send the priest to hear his confession. The man seemed very healthy and had eaten all of his dinner, Sister Richard Marie said. She assured him he wouldn’t die, but a nagging feeling made her go and find the priest anyway. The man died by the morning.

“I was never so glad that I had called the priest,” she said.

Sister Richard Marie said she would have wanted the remains of Mother Marianne to stay in Kalaupapa, but she knew that “the place won’t last forever.”

The settlement had 33 people when she left it several years ago after suffering a stroke.

“Now there are only 23,” she said.

Sister William Marie Eleniki

Sister William Marie Eleniki’s life would be very different if Mother Marianne had not brought the Franciscans to Hawaii more than 120 years ago. She is one of about 40 Franciscan Sisters born in the islands.

Growing up in Kaimuki, Sister William Marie first met the Sisters in high school.

“The sisters were very good to me,” she said. Good enough that she wanted to be one.

However her mother was “dead against it” because she was an only child.

Instead of making her wait until she was 21, her parents relented and allowed her to join after her senior year.

“It was peaceful,” she said of her decision.

However, her parents tried more subtle ways to get her to give up the idea of going to the novitiate in Syracuse.

“Coming from Hawaii, many of the things you are told is that you are going to have to eat mash potatoes,” she said. “That was the whole scare tactic.”

“The closest we got to rice was rice pudding. For us, it was a cultural adjustment. But there was a sense of camaraderie,” she said. “Once the sisters knew you were from Hawaii, they looked out for you. They still do that.”

Sister William Marie lived in Syracuse for 13 years, and despite not liking school as a child, she was assigned to education.

She didn’t know much about Mother Marianne until 1975, when she returned to Hawaii and her cause for canonization was just beginning. She learned that Mother Marianne represented a woman of courage and vision who was a perfect example for the needs of today.

“So many times we have the wrong models,” she said. “We need more people like this. It is kind of nice that John Paul II brought sainthood to the people.”

“She is someone who is relevant,” she said. “She had a sense of sacrifice.”

“We are lucky” that she will be honored by beatification.

Sister Jacinta Martin

As a young girl born and raised in Hawaii, Sister Jacinta Martin had thoughts of becoming a religious sister, but thought that sisters only came “from the mainland.”

That was until she met Sister Esther, one of her teachers at St. Francis Convent School on Oahu who was Hawaiian.

“That confirmed it for me that I indeed could become a sister,” she said.

Sister Jacinta joined the Franciscans after high school graduation and was in Syracuse by September. Her parents objected at first. They didn’t believe it was a good life for a girl. But once they met the superior from Syracuse during a routine visit to Oahu, they were convinced it would be all right.

Nevertheless, they didn’t think their daughter would last very long.

“My father gave me six weeks,” she said. “He said I’d never keep quiet long enough.”

Sister Jacinta taught kindergarten in Syracuse for 10 years, then taught middle school, sixth grade and high school.

“That was a wonderful experience,” she said.

She first learned of Mother Marianne in the novitiate.

“I don’t remember her at all being here in high school,” she said. “It was when I got to Syracuse and the nursing sisters talked about Molokai.”

She knew about Kalaupapa, but not the Franciscan connection.

She served briefly in Hilo, then went to California for nine years to care for her parents who had moved there.

She returned to Hawaii 13 years ago. Now semi-retired, she helps supervise study halls and monitors one class a day at St. Francis School in Manoa.

“It’s good to be back at my alma mater,” she said. “The girls are always kind of struck with that. They go back to old yearbooks to look us up.”

She in turn has become more impressed by her predecessor.

“More and more I have come to admire her endeavors,” she said of Mother Marianne. “She was a woman with a vision, really. I would not have met the St. Francis Sisters without Mother Marianne and I realize that.”

“The community has been so supportive and generous toward me,” she said, providing her with a “wonderful education” from Le Moyne College, Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Hawaii.

A stroke a year ago has left Sister Jacinta with a little weakness on the left side, so she walks with a cane.

“You need to know what your calling is so you can accept it,” she said.

Her community is a source of inspiration. “I saw them always as women of prayer,” she said, “women of joy.”

<B>Sister Theresa Chow

For Sister Theresa Chow, responding to the call to become a Franciscan required divine intervention, obedience and a strong dose of courage.

Growing up in Kalihi, she knew no Catholics. Her family was Taoist.

But as a child she learned the “Our Father,” the “Hail Mary” and the “Glory Be” from neighbor kids who, though not Catholic, attended St. Theresa School.

By high school, she began listening for God’s voice by attending a variety of churches.

“I think I was just searching for God,” she said.

Sister Theresa and her older sister joined the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace parish in Honolulu because it was conveniently on their bus route.

When Sacred Hearts Father Matthew Lochs baptized her and her sister, he encouraged her to go on a vocation retreat at the St. Francis convent in Manoa. There, she met Sister Rose Annette Ahuna and other sisters.

“That was when I really made up my mind to become a sister,” she said.

There was no family opposition. Her mother had died when she was four and her father had little objection.

In Syracuse, she became a kindergarten teacher. She eventually left teaching and entered parish work in Syracuse, then in California and New Mexico where she worked with the Navajo Indians.

While in New Mexico, she corresponded with Sacred Hearts Father Lane Akiona who was interested in having a sister work in his parish of St. Augustine in Waikiki. She returned to Hawaii and worked at St. Augustine, then at St. Patrick.

She now assists Franciscan Sister Florence Remata at Immaculate Conception Parish on Kauai.

Sister Theresa attended the exhumation of Mother Marianne in Kalaupapa in February. Recovering now from an accident, she is unable to attend the beatification in Rome. She would have liked to go, she feels privileged to have been at Kalaupapa.

“I feel I had the better part,” she said.

Sister Theresa appreciates Mother Marianne’s courageous example.

“She is a model of goodness,” she said. “For her to say ‘yes,’ not knowing the future and what to expect is a very important decision for someone to make. It teaches us that sometimes, that is what we need to do. We need to make decisions without realizing the outcome.”

Sister Rose Annette Ahuna

Sister Rose Annette Ahuna is originally from St. Joseph Parish, Hilo. Her parents were converts. Her father was a Kamehameha Schools graduate and worked at the railroad. Her mother was originally from Kohala and went to Oahu for her education and to become a teacher.

Like her mother, Sister Rose Annette too wanted to become a teacher. The youngest of six children, now all deceased, she was educated by the Franciscan Sisters at St. Joseph School in Hilo from the first grade. It was through seeing the sisters and their interaction, later at St. Francis High School on Oahu, that she found her vocation.

“Through their example, that is how I was called to the convent,” she said.

“At that time, though it was called St. Francis Convent School, it was the Mother Marianne Memorial (convent),” she said. While there, she got to know the sisters a little more.

She said that the examples of the Franciscan Sisters and the sacrifice of Mother Marianne were tremendous models to which to aspire. Consider “all that Mother Marianne sacrificed in her life,” she said. “I just came from Hilo to Honolulu, but Mother Marianne came from New York. When she came, it was known as the Sandwich Islands. And she never went back.”

Sister Marion Kikukawa

Born on Molokai to Arthur and Cecily Kikukawa, Sister Marion Kikukawa is connected to Mother Marianne through her deep Friendly Isle roots.

Sister Marion’s mother came to Hawaii from Connecticut to teach. She met and married Arthur and they moved to Molokai in the early thirties. They ran a dress shop, a florist shop and the well-known Midnight Inn.

Sister Marion and her sister and two brothers went to Molokai public schools and attended St. Sophia Church in Kaunakakai. Growing up with the Sacred Heart priests as pastors gave her a strong connection to Blessed Damien, who besides serving on the island’s northern Kalaupapa peninsula, also built some churches topside.

“We would go up to the lookout and look out on Kalaupapa,” she said. “We knew the story there.”

Her mother, who still lives on Molokai, once portrayed Mother Marianne in a Damien Day celebration.

“We have a picture of her in full habit,” Sister Marion said. “That was the first time I can recall that the sisters had been there.”

The sisters from Kalaupapa had climbed up to topside to attend the event.

And once — she doesn’t remember the occasion — the Kalaupapa choir hiked up topside.

“I remember the patients,” she said. “It gave a face and very human the story we had heard about Kalaupapa.”

Sister Marion attended St. Francis High School on Oahu in the early 1960s and got to know the sisters well.

“That is where I think I had a realization that I had a vocation and that is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said.

Unbeknownst to her, her father had that hunch all along that she had a religious calling. “He said that he always thought that that might be the case,” she said.

She said that besides being good educators the sisters who taught her were “fun people and seemed to live a happy and fulfilling life.”

“I think I was kind of pointed in the direction of a teacher,” she said, noting that her grandfather and mother had followed that profession.

While boarding at St. Francis, she lived a “regular life even as a teenager,” but joined the sisters for Mass, meals and chapel services.

“Being around them a lot was influential,” she said.

Sister Marion went to Chaminade College in Honolulu for two years and on to Syracuse in 1967.

With family in Connecticut and a boarding experience under her belt, the adjustment was easier than for other Hawaii women. She liked Syracuse and enjoyed the change of seasons.

She became a teacher and later principal, serving in Syracuse, Hilo, and Long Beach, Calif., taking college administration courses in between assignments.

Her order elected her as a council member in 1991 and general minister — the head of her community — in 1999. During this time she became more involved with the cause of Mother Marianne.

In 2003 she returned to Hawaii to become principal of St. Joseph School in Hilo where she had taught earlier.

“I enjoy it,” she said. “I always had a warm place in my heart for St. Joseph school.”

Mother Marianne had also been the superior of her order when she took her Hawaii assignment, which in those days was real missionary work in a foreign country.

“She didn’t rest on her laurels of the things she had done in Syracuse. She pushed up her sleeves and went to work with everyone else,” Sister Marion said.

“She was always looking at the next thing that God was calling her to,” she said. “That is why we are celebrating her now.”

Instead of going to Rome for Mother Marianne’s beatification, Sister Marion will be in Kalaupapa attending a 7 a.m. Mass at St. Francis Church celebrating the event.

“The beatification will already be over, but it will be an opportunity to be connected to Rome,” she said.

<B>Franciscan Sister Candida Oroc<W0>

Sister Candida was born in the 1930s in the remote area of Makaweli on Kauai and grew up in nearby Waimea. Her mother was a “very prayerful woman” and her father a sugar plantation worker who helped out at the parish, where the young girl met the Sisters of St. Francis from Wisconsin, a different community from the Syracuse group.

As a result of that contact, she and a friend decided they were going to St. Francis Convent School in Manoa.

“With father’s assistance, Lucy and I worked for our tuition,” she said.

Sister Candida felt called to become a Franciscan at about her junior year. About that time she also learned about Mother Marianne.

“We had a sister, she was very old, and she knew Mother Marianne and she would tell stories,” she said.

A picture of the nun emerged as one who seemed “strict and stern” but was actually “very caring and protective” of the patients.

“I remember when I told my parents that I would like to become a sister,” Sister Candida said. “My mother was happy and my father just left the room.”

She wanted both of their blessings before she left and told her sister that if both parents say, “yes, you can go,” she would go. Her father demonstrated his acceptance in a touching way.

“The day I left the airport, he told me to kneel down and he gave me his blessing in front of everyone,” she said.

Her father is now 101 years old and lives in a care home.

As a Franciscan, Sister Candida earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in education and a master’s in theology.

She learned about Mother Marianne through the stories and memories of Hansen’s disease patients she met at their Hale Mohalu residence in Pearl City.

“She was a real human nun,” she said. “After a while, it seemed like I knew her personally.”

Sister Candida once had a letter written by Mother Marianne that talked about being good to the children. It is now in the Mother Marianne museum in Syracuse.

“It was like a letter written personally to me,” she said.

Sister Candida described her experience at Kalaupapa during the exhumation of Mother Marianne’s remains as “profound.”

She envisioned Mother Marianne in Kalaupapa, with the young women “milling around,” being kept busy and happy.

After the remains of Mother Marianne were completely removed from the earth, Sister Candida helped stand watch over them in Bishop Home, the convent.

On Jan. 24, meditating about her predecessor and the cliffs and ocean outside, she composed this poem:

The blue-green majestic sea cliffs of Molokai

Sing of a woman of Love.

The trade winds play music of harmony

Along the rippled sides with strength and peace,

A song of the compassionate God above.

The ocean waves (hum and) gently was the base cliffs

And rocky sandy shores,

As sentinels, the cliffs secure the holy ground

And its people.

The blue skies speak of God’s grace

As reconciliation and acceptance embrace.

The clouds and rains wipe clean the ‘aina’

This special place – Kalaupapa

The trees and leaves dance gracefully

Continuing the story of a gentle, brave woman.

The birds join in and sing joyfully

Of the presence of a Sister of St. Francis,

A woman of hope,

Mother Marianne Cope.