Photo by Lisa Dahm

Maryknoll Sisters pose in front of the grotto on their property in Monrovia, Calif. Standing, from left, are Sister Kathryn Shannon, Sister D.J. Pardini, Sister Peggy Dawson, Sister Joanne Crevcoure, Sister Katherine Byrne and Sister Marie Rosso. Seated from left are Sister Beatrice Carvalho, Sister Bernadette Higa and Sister Mary Louise Higa.

Where do Maryknoll Sisters go after service in Hawaii? Many to a small community in southern California

By Lisa Dahm | Special to the Herald

MONROVIA, Calif.

Special Mass to mark Maryknoll’s 80th year in isles This year marks the 80th anniversary of the arrival of the Maryknoll missioners to Hawaii. Bishop Larry Silva will celebrate the event with a Mass at 7 p.m., Nov. 30, at Sacred Heart Church in Punahou. The Maryknoll Fathers’ U.S. superior Father Clyde Phillips, who is originally from Hilo, will preach. More than 125 priests and nine brothers have served in Hawaii since they first arrived in 1927. Nearly 400 Maryknoll Sisters have worked in the islands over the same period. Today, two Maryknoll priests and 15 Maryknoll Sisters serve in Hawaii.

On a picturesque piece of property nestled beneath the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California can be found a rich pool of Hawaii church history.

There, in the small town of Monrovia, about 10 miles east of Pasadena, lives a group of adventurous, independent women who helped shape the Diocese of Honolulu during its critical formative years. They were teachers, principals, social workers, community activists, health workers, administrators and more.

They are Maryknoll Sisters. Now retired, all at one time were missioned in Hawaii. Some were born there; others adopted the islands as their home.

Maryknoll, an American order founded to spread the Gospel throughout the world, attracted women who were courageous, spirited, adaptable and eager to serve. For the sisters of Monrovia, their joyful embrace of life and their yearning to help others have stayed with them into retirement. The setting may be peaceful and quiet, but the sisters are lively and very busy — each still serving Christ in her own way.

The Hawaii Catholic Herald visited the sisters earlier this year. Here are some of their stories.

Sister Mary Naab

Sister Mary Naab came with the “second wave” of Maryknoll Sisters to Hawaii, the first being those who opened Maryknoll School in 1927. This time, instead of teachers the order sent social workers. Bishop James J. Sweeney needed them to run a Catholic Charities operation for his three-year-old diocese.

Sister Mary Naab

Sister Mary arrived on a ship with seven other Maryknoll Sisters, five Maryknoll Fathers and about 350 shipyard workers headed for Pearl Harbor. It was 1944 and still wartime.

Sister Mary is now 85. Growing up in Passaic, N.J., she became enthralled with the Maryknoll order at age eight when she and her little sister found a collection of Maryknoll Magazines at their aunt’s house. She joined at age 18.

Her first “assignment” on Oahu was to sign up for graduate studies in social work at the University of Hawaii.

Sister Mary would spend a total of 44 years in Hawaii, returning to the islands for different assignments up until she retired in 1988.

Her last job was at the Queen Liliuokalani Children’s Center, an organization for Hawaiian orphans and single parent children. The work sent her to Molokai from 1975 to 1983.

“It is a wonderful island,” she said. “It was a very interesting experience, wonderful people.”

In Hawaii, she witnessed the building of the diocese and Maryknoll’s unique contribution to that effort. Later she would see her order make the Vatican II transition, from habits to civilian clothes, from religious to baptismal names, from limited assignments to an expansion of ministries.

“Services changed throughout the social services community and we changed with them,” she said.

(Note: After this interview, Sister Mary Naab moved to Maryknoll, N.Y.)

Sister Marie Rosso

Sister Marie Rosso entered Maryknoll in 1948 and spent the first 22 years of religious life as a teacher, first in New York City, then in 1960 at St. Anthony School, Kalihi, later in the Marshall Islands for three years, then back to Kalihi at St. Anthony and St. John the Baptist Schools.

After those two decades, she recalled, her “inner clock said, ‘Time to move on.’”

So she worked with the poor in Kalihi Valley Housing and eventually began helping women at risk, including single mothers.

“That provided many rich experiences,” she said. “I think I learned so much from those women … their courage in facing great adversity.”

Sister Marie became an integral part of the Diocese of Honolulu’s Women’s Concerns Committee and its effort to educate the public on domestic violence.

“In the 90s it was still an issue that wasn’t too well known,” she said.

The committee spoke at parishes on domestic violence whenever invited, and once a year in October the bishop asked the clergy to preach on the topic.

“What struck me was that every time we gave a presentation, women would come up afterward and say, ‘My mother went through this,’ ‘I went through this,’ ‘My niece is going through this’ and so on,” she said.

Sister Marie moved from fighting domestic violence to working with women trying to leave prostitution.

“It was like a conversion experience for me,” she said. “I don’t think I had any idea of the abuse that these women took or the difficulty that it was for them to get out of that.”

For about five years she served as a “listening ear,” helping about 50 women make the transition to a life off of the streets.

“I began to realize the danger they lived in and the uncertainty and trauma, but also the indignity that they had to suffer,” she said.

“I feel I have been very blessed with the people that I have met through my life at Maryknoll,” Sister Marie said.

“And that begins with the Maryknoll Sisters. I felt that as a young woman of 17, I was surrounded by wonderful role models. And now that I’ve come here to Monrovia, I still feel that I am surrounded by wonderful role models of how you move on in life.”

Sister Beatrice Carvalho

At age four, Beatrice Carvalho greeted the first Maryknoll Sisters who came to work at St. Anthony School in Wailuku. From that first encounter, she knew she wanted to join them.

“I just loved their openness and joy and I said that is a good place to belong to if you want to be a religious,” she said.

It almost didn’t happen. Bishop Sweeney had a rule at the time that Hawaii girls could only join the “local” Franciscan or Sacred Hearts congregations.

But Beatrice was determined to find a way around the rules.

“I was a Maryknoller from the time I was four,” she said. “I was in no way going to another community.”

She was a high school senior when the foundress of the Maryknoll Order came from New York for a visit. The teenager nabbed an opportunity to escort the sister to an assembly. When she had the superior alone to herself, she pleaded her case.

Sister Beatrice remembered the nun’s response. “She said, ‘Dear, write to me and I’ll get you in.’”

Because it was 1944 and the country was still at war, it took the Maui girl three months to get to Maryknoll, N.Y., and officially enter the order. Once there, she found her home.

Beginning in 1951, Sister Beatrice worked for 20 years teaching and running schools in Nicaragua, Panama and Mexico, working with the Vincentian Fathers and the Jesuits.

She left Mexico for Maui in 1971 because her parents weren’t well and a job opened up at St. Anthony, her old alma mater.

“I was only a block and a half away from my home,” she said.

Some of her students were the children of her former classmates. “I went around and said, ‘You are a Spencer; you are a Nobriga,’ and they said, ‘Yes.’”

She taught at St. Anthony until 1980. In the meantime, both her parents died and she was able to attend their funerals.

“It was a privilege that not all Maryknoll Sisters had,” she said.

In 1985, Sister Beatrice was assigned to Mezquital, Guatemala. She was called back to the United States in 2001 to be co-director of Maryknoll’s Chicago orientation house, where she worked with novices until 2005. She retired to Monrovia, “with the kings,” on Jan. 6, 2006.

Sister Mary Louise Higa

Biological sisters Mary Louise and Bernadette Higa entered Maryknoll together, then led separate Maryknoll careers for 40 years before reuniting again in Hawaii and retiring together at Monrovia.

The siblings were born and raised on Maui in a Buddhist household.

Sister Mary Louise became a Catholic in 1945 during her senior year in high school. She had attended CCD classes since grade school through the public school “student release” program. Though not Catholic, she preferred catechism to the alternative — working in the school garden — and the principal approved.

“There were 10 of us and we were the top students. We had to memorize the Baltimore Catechism without knowing what it meant too deeply. We liked learning new stuff. I think that was the beginning of the spirit moving some of us.”

After high school, Sister Mary Louise entered nurses’ training at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu.

Looking to join a religious order, she picked Maryknoll over the Franciscans who ran the hospital because she “wanted to go to Japan or some faraway place for mission work.”

“Maryknoll Magazine was the reason,” she said. “Of course, the Franciscan Sisters were disappointed. They had their eye on me, as well as others.”

She entered in 1951 and was sent to Hong Kong where she worked in health care for many years. There she helped establish community nursing programs and hospital pastoral ministry.

Sister Mary Louise returned to Hawaii in 1991.

She spent three years as a volunteer visiting Oahu’s Women’s Correctional Facility.

“It was really an eye opener because I had never gone into a prison,” she said.

“Gradually, as I got initiated, my fears disappeared and I began to appreciate and see the women as persons and not as prisoners or inmates. They are just like any one of us who are going through a difficult time in their journey.”

Sister Mary Louise also volunteered at the Life Foundation, which serves those with AIDS and HIV.

“I would say that it really helped me to respect people of different sex orientations. You see them as people and don’t really categorize them.”

She spent her last five years in Hawaii in Wahiawa in a semi-retired “ministry of presence” extended to neighbors, parishioners and her own family.

“It gave me a chance to return the services that my sisters and brothers gave to my parents while I was away in the mission field,” she said.

She and her sister moved to Monrovia in February 2006.

Sister Bernadette Higa

Sister Bernadette Higa joined the Maryknoll Sisters with her sister in 1951 but, at one point, had considered becoming a contemplative nun.

She was first attracted by Maryknoll’s foreign missions. “But then, reading some books about St. Therese of Lisieux, I got very interested in the Carmelites,” she said.

However, when she learned that the Carmelite novitiate was in Canada, she decided on Maryknoll “because they had their training in the USA.”

Her first Maryknoll assignment wasn’t overseas; it was Kansas City, Mo. The bishop there had wanted to desegregate the operation of the hospital and its patient admissions (this was before the civil rights movement) and the Maryknollers agreed to take the job.

But Kansas may well have been a foreign country to Sister Bernadette who had difficulty grasping the local accent. Once when told that the “piper” man had arrived, she expected the plumber but got the newspaper delivery guy.

“I came to understand what they were talking about,” she said with a laugh. “They had enough trouble understanding me.”

After five years, she got the foreign assignment she wanted in Taiwan where she worked in a medical clinic. She spent 14 years there, serving several communities including the aboriginal tribes who lived in the mountains.

She then returned to the U.S., finished college and in 1980 went to Bangladesh where she taught natural family planning. In 1984, she received her first Hawaii assignment.

She had been gone so long it was Hawaii that now seemed foreign.

“All those years that I wasn’t there, they built these freeways, which we never had. And all the familiar landmarks, like the theaters, they were all gone. It was like coming to a foreign country.”

Her first Hawaii job was as assistant chaplain at the state hospital for the mentally ill. She was apprehensive at first.

“I got over it working there,” she said. “It was very interesting because I heard that these people hold on firmly to their religious beliefs. They might have lost everything else, but their religion they hold on to.”

The work became one of her most rewarding experiences.

“I felt that I found my niche there,” she said.

She said that living the semi-retired life in Wahiawa with her sister was the first time they had been together since they were kids.

“Dad and Mom could not understand why we could not go home together,” she said.

Sister Joan Crevcoure

Sister Joan Crevcoure, also known as Sister Michael Joseph, spent all of her active mission life in the Pacific. She entered Maryknoll in 1946. Four years later she was in Hawaii, teaching at Maryknoll School.

“They always say there is a very strong love attachment to the first assignment,” she said. “The kids were really simple, alive and fresh. So much of our life was home visiting and knowing the people.”

One of her 12 years in Hawaii was spent at St. Michael School in Waialua on Oahu’s north shore, isolated from the 45-sister Honolulu community.

“I didn’t know it, but I was being prepared to go to the Marshall Islands, another 5,000 miles over into the center of the Pacific,” she said.

“I felt really bad about leaving Hawaii, which was so much a part of my blood at that point, but I had always been attracted to someplace new and different. I think it is part of our Maryknoll vocation.”

She served 42 years in the Marshalls, starting on a coral island at six feet above sea level, then working her way to the more isolated outer islands.

“There were no planes; you had to go by boat or ship,” she said. And with no priest, they rarely had Mass.

Sister Joan returned to Maryknoll School briefly in the early 1970s to serve as principal and to teach a few classes.

Back to the Marshalls, she asked some of her former Honolulu students to help the sisters publish a book of prayers and hymns in Marshallese.

“Those books are still being used today,” she said, which is “no small thing” considering the weather and the less than appropriate storage.

“Those [Hawaii] kids did so much for the islands and they never really were conscious of it. But what a wonderful group they were. They were sharing in my mission.”

Growing up in Green Bay, Wis., Sister Joan knew in the third grade that she wanted to be a religious. Though she could barely write, she somehow got the address for the Divine Word Sisters in Techne, Ill., and sent them a letter asking to join their missionary community.

“I remember racing home after school every day to try to get to the mailbox before my mother did,” she said.

“The letter finally came and they said they were very interested in hearing about my mission vocation and I must pray every day, study hard and keep my health good. And keep writing.”

In the interim, she read Maryknoll Magazine and decided to enter that order after high school. Her pastor, however, would not give her the permission she needed until her brother returned from the war.

“I thought all the way through, ‘God just kind of guides your steps and it is always for the best, even if you don’t know it,’” she said. “It is just great to be a Maryknoller. It is a privilege and a joy.”

Sister Joan ended her service in the Marshalls in 2004. She has been a Maryknoll Sister for 60 years.

Sister Kathryn Shannon

Hailing from the small town of Oconomowoc, Wis., Sister Kathryn Shannon, also known as Sister David Miriam to her former students, was first assigned to Hawaii in 1951.

“Six of us left here from L.A. on a freighter,” she said. “We had a five-day trip on the Pacific Ocean. And when I arrived, just the color of the blue-green water and the smell of the flowers and the leis when you arrive, I thought, ‘Wow! It is so tough.’”

Sister Kathryn spent 13 years as a teacher at Maryknoll Grade School in Honolulu, then six years as principal. She taught a year at St. John the Baptist School in Kalihi and ended with three years at St. Anthony School, Kalihi.

“Norman Chow was my student,” she said. “He was a defense coach for USC.

“He is a millionaire but I don’t have his address,” she joked.

Another of her students was Jacques Charlot, son of famed artist and muralist Jean Charlot.

The elder Charlot visited her classroom once when her students were painting murals. Sister Kathryn had done her own rendering of Christ.

“I don’t know if I asked him for advice or what, but he said something like, ‘When you paint Jesus on the cross, what can I say?’”

Sister Kathryn said that a turning point in her life was the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As she marched with other sisters in full habit down the streets of Honolulu to the Episcopal cathedral, she had a thought that “we should be working with black people somehow.”

She ended up spending the last 20 years of her active ministry in Africa.

Sister Kathryn left Hawaii in 1968.

“They were very happy years,” she said of her time in the islands. “I loved the children and the people.”

She served in Tanzania, Zimbabwe and then Sudan, leaving in 1999 because of the civil strife.

“That is why I came home,” she said. “The civil war heated up and it was very bad.”

Now a Maryknoller for 61 years, she is enjoying her time in Monrovia, where she enjoys a new life chapter and a more contemplative aspect of her vocation.

Sister Peggy Dawson

Sister Peggy Dawson, also known in Hawaii as Sister Mary Gratian, was in Hawaii 28 years. She arrived in 1962, after teaching 10 years on the mainland.

“I was assigned directly to Maui, the love of my life,” she said.

Asked to teach art at St. Anthony School in Wailuku, she went to the University of Nebraska to earn a fine arts degree.

“I went back to St. Anthony and developed the art department,” she said. “The kids just loved it. I had these big football players and they loved ceramics.”

Sister Peggy left Maui in 1978 for Waimanalo where she started a community garden and began substitute teaching at the public school.

“It was great, the kids would come running in screaming, ‘Sister Peggy, Sister Peggy,’” she said. “For most of the teachers, it wasn’t a problem.”

“I got to know the people,” she said. “(I had my) little blue Volkswagen and my dog hanging out the window, and everybody knew when I was coming, mainly by the dog.”

It was literacy advocate Wally Amos who convinced her to start an adult literacy program.

She found a “decrepit” one-room unit in a housing project, got permission to use it, and with the help of a charismatic prayer group from Kailua, made repairs, painted it green, and called it the Ola Hou Adult Center.

There she taught literacy and English as a second language and brought in a nurse to teach health. Receiving a part-time salary from the state Department of Education, Sister Peggy worked there until 1992.

“They gave me a nice send off. I received a diploma from the state for my service to Hawaii. It was nice.”

From Waimanalo she went to Papua New Guinea for four years, then spent three years at Maryknoll, N.Y.

After a brief return to Hawaii, she retired to Monrovia where she devotes time to her art.

“I love it here,” she said of her California home. “I dibble dabble and paint rocks to sell. Do a few canvases, not too many, but I hope to do more. And I have an extensive garden, which is a real challenge.”

Originally from Washington State, Sister Peggy had only been a Catholic four years before she joined Maryknoll. At a boarding school run by nuns, a Franciscan priest asked if she ever thought about being a missionary.

“I personally wanted to do something for the Lord,” she said. “Converts have this enthusiasm. I think it was more than that for me.”

However, she decided on Maryknoll over the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary.

“I had never heard of Maryknoll in my life. I saw no magazines,” she said.

“Don’t ask me, I have no explanation, but I guess God wanted me here and here I am. I have been here 60 years. I’ve never regretted it. It was a good choice.”

Sister Kathryn Byrne

Sister Kathryn Byrne spent five of her 54 years as a Maryknoll Sister serving in Hawaii. She had earlier spent 26 years in Hong Kong. She arrived in the islands in 1988, coming from an assignment in the Holy Land, and stayed until 1992.

On Oahu she worked for Project Respect, an interfaith volunteer caregiver group with about 300 volunteers based in churches and temples.

“It was very ecumenical group,” she said. “It was such a surprise after the Holy Land where everybody is in his or her strict categories.”

She spent her final year in Hawaii on the Big Island in Hilo working for the Office of Social Ministry Care-A-Van, a program that brings medical care and services to the homeless.

Though her stay was brief, the islands left a wonderful impression on the missionary sister.

“In Hawaii, everybody loved everybody else,” she said.

Sister Daniel Joseph Pardini

Sister Daniel Joseph Pardini first came to Hawaii in 1987 after serving 20 years in Hong Kong. On Oahu, Sister DJ, as she was always called, volunteered one day a week with Catholic Charities Services to the Elderly in Chinatown.

“The staff was just so wonderful to me,” she said. “To me, it was just like being in Hong Kong again.”

She then moved to the Waianae coast and began work as a volunteer four days a week at the Maililand Transition Shelter.

“I enjoyed it so much because it was my first time back in the United States and everybody spoke English,” she said. “It was so nice.”

What she most enjoyed about Hawaii, she said, was working with the people in Waianae. At Maililand, Sister DJ distributed clothing and food and started a garden project with the women of the temporary housing community.

“It started in them the feeling that ‘I can do something. It got them out of that traumatized state of not having a home, or not having stability.”

“Then my mother got very sick and I went home, so I had to quit at Maililand, but I still keep in touch with the people there,” she said.