Special to the Herald

Birth certificate

Citizenship certificate

On July 10, the Pacific Province of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary celebrated the 100th birthday of its last missionary sister to Hawaii.

Sister Maria Seraphina Maziliauskaite marked her extraordinary milestone at Malia O Ka Malu Community convent in Kaimuki. She is the oldest living religious in Hawaii. She made her first vows 72 years ago, and has lived in Hawaii for seven decades.

Sister Maria Seraphina was born Marijona Maziliauskaite in 1907 in Lithuania, in the village of Mergutrakiai, in the parish of Punskas, in the region of Suvalkai.

Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the family moved to the city of Kalvarija. During the war, the family was evacuated to Russia and remained there for four years. They returned to Lithuania in 1918.

Following the call to religious life, Marijona left Lithuania in 1932 to enter the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts in Holland. She was sent to France for her novitiate and on Feb. 12, 1935, made her first profession of religious vows.

Two years later, on March 24, 1937, Sister Maria Seraphina arrived in Hawaii at the historic Sacred Hearts Sisters Fort Street convent in downtown Honolulu next door to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace. There she began the ministry which she would continue until her retirement – teaching second graders the whole day long! At Fort Street she was involved in a ministry dear to her congregational heart: preparing public school children for their First Holy Communion.

In 1938, she moved with the Fort Street community to a new convent in Nuuanu. There she remained until she was sent to pioneer the new Immaculate Conception Convent and School in Lihue, Kauai. Lihue was her home from 1951 to 1972, after which she again lived in Nuuanu from 1972 to 1987.

In 1987, she joined the Regina Pacis Convent community in Kaimuki, until poor health pressed her into moving in 2000 to the adjacent Malia O Ka Malu Convent, the Sisters’ retirement home and infirmary.

Although she still keeps abreast of the news in Lithuania, Sister Maria Seraphina has long ago adopted Hawaii as her home and the United States as her country. She was naturalized a U.S. citizen on Aug. 29, 1946.

Now, at 100 years old, she no longer adds her lovely voice to liturgical celebrations and she has stopped sewing the colorful Hawaiian print potholders for which she was well-known. But she is still an avid reader and faithful correspondent. Her blue eyes still sparkle and her bright smile still radiates serenity.

She recalls days long ago in far away Lithuania — joys like those in a Catholic family with a devoted mother, older brother and three younger sisters, one of whom later joined her Congregation; and sorrows like the loss of her father, killed in action in World War I.

Her oft-repeated desire is “to do God’s will through obedience.”

Today her ministry of constant prayer and redemptive suffering continues to advance the Kingdom of a loving God.

Happy birthday, Sister Maria Seraphina!

Adapted from an article written by Sister M. Dolorine Pires, SS.CC., in Me Ka ‘Ohana, Vol. 27, No. 1, p. 15