By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Father Jason Souza is a local Kailua boy who left for a mainland seminary about 20 years ago and ended up a priest for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He’s back home this month with an Oahu parish assignment and the hopes of joining the Honolulu diocese sometime in the future.

The Hawaiian-Japanese-Portuguese Father Souza, 36, is the son of Nancy and Melvin Souza of Keolu Hills in Kailua. His parents are retired. His father was employed by AMFAC and his mother was a surgical nurse for Honolulu Medical Group and Kaiser Permanente. His brother John, his only sibling, died in 2002.

Father Souza attended St. John Vianney Grade School and Kamehameha High School. He told the Hawaii Catholic Herald in a Jan. 31 phone conversation that he is the only Kamehameha grad ordained a Catholic priest.

His vocational stirrings began at a very early age.

A priest was “something that I knew oddly enough I was going to be before first grade,” he said. “Early on it just stuck in my head.”

Father Souza remembered with fondness the priests of his childhood at St. John Vianney — Father Patrick Freitas, Father Jack Newton, the late Father Bartholomew O’Leary and Father Nathan Mamo, whom he described as his mentor.

After high school, he headed for St. John College Seminary in Camarillo, Calif., as a candidate for priesthood for the Diocese of Honolulu. However, after his first year, after having “immersed” himself in Hispanic ministry and culture, he switched to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Upon completing four years of college and nearly all of his four years of graduate theology studies, Father Souza should have been ordained with the class of 1996. Instead he took a couple of years off to work with the Los Angeles juvenile probation program and the L.A. Police Department’s community relations program.

But “the call never went away,” he said. He returned to the seminary to finish up and was ordained by Cardinal Roger Mahony at St. John Vianney Parish in Hacienda Heights on May 30, 1998.

His nine years of priesthood have been spent as an associate pastor at three parishes — four years at St. John of God Parish in Norwalk, three at St. Charles Borromeo Parish in North Hollywood, where he was a concelebrant at the public memorial for Bob Hope, and the last two years at St. Anthony Parish in Long Beach.

He also served for four years on the archdiocesan priest council and was its recording secretary.

Coming back to serve as a priest in Hawaii was “something I always wanted to end up doing,” he said. Cardinal Mahony’s official designation of his Hawaii assignment is “ad experimentum,” which Father Souza roughly translated as, “we’ll see how it goes.”

He will be here at least three years “in the hope of” joining the Diocese of Honolulu, he said.

Bishop Silva assigned him as an associate pastor of the Manoa-Punahou Catholic Community, made up of the parishes of Sacred Heart, Punahou, and St. Pius X, Manoa. He will reside at the Sacred Heart rectory.

Father Souza said that he’s “very happy” to be here where his entire family — “uncles, aunties, cousins” — reside.

He will also be able to resume the island pursuits of short-board surfing, shoreline fishing and trolling (“all my cousins have boats”). In California, he would hit the waves at Huntington Beach.