In the right place, at the right time

Retired Bishop Ferrario sees God’s generous providence as guiding him through 50 blessed years of priesthood.

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

On the day it was announced that Bishop Joseph A. Ferrario had been chosen to become the auxiliary bishop of Honolulu, a reporter asked him why he had been picked and not someone else. The bishop-designate answered with a quote from an unlikely source -- that day’s Peanuts comic strip.

As Bishop Ferrario recalled it, a character in the first panel asks, “What is divine providence?” The bishop is unclear about the next bit of dialogue, but the final punch line (by Linus?) he remembers word for word: “Divine providence is being in the right place in the right time.”

As the retired Bishop of Honolulu reviewed the past events of his life of 75 years in an interview last week with the Hawaii Catholic Herald, it grew obvious that the theology of Charles Shultz hit the nail on the head. At least where Bishop Ferrario was concerned. The circuitous route from Pennsylvania businessman’s son to head of the Catholic Church in Hawaii was hardly of his own design. It was indeed divine providence.

The times were right and so were the places in which he found himself.

As Bishop Ferrario celebrates his 50th year of ordination on May 19, he is still filled with awe and wonderment at the graces that God’s providence has showered on him. “I’ve really been blessed in the opportunities that I’ve had,” he said.

The fact he was ordained at all was an unexpected blessing. Groomed to join his father’s paint and wallpaper business, the young Joseph Ferrario went to Scranton public schools through high school. If any of the three Ferrario boys was pious enough to be a priest, it was probably the youngest one, not Joseph the middle son.

For him, the local parish was a pretty good place for sports and social activities.

That was until he found himself at a Maryknoll junior college seminary on a informal outing arranged for him and others by a couple of the parish priests.

“I met two seminarians,” he said. “They intrigued me.”

“The first chance I had I visited them on my own,” he said. He ended up filling out an application. (Of the Maryknoll seminarians he met, he would again run into a few of them as missioner priests in Hawaii -- Father Joseph Avery and Father Francis Diffley.)

However, his pastor later convinced him to enter the diocesan minor seminary rather than join the Maryknoll missioners.

“My parents were a little surprised,” Bishop Ferrario said of his decision to become a priest.

In college he met Bill Mattimore, a Massachusetts seminarian, who remained his lifelong friend and who now is administrator of St. George Church in Waimanalo.

In the seminary, the young Ferrario was educated by a society of priests established for the sole purpose of training future parish clergy, the Sulpicians.

He was again intrigued. “I have a great love for parish priests,” he said, and this society of men, dedicated to the formation of diocesan clergy, seemed to him to be a satisfying way to express that enthusiasm.

So, upon his ordination by Bishop William J. Hafey on May 19, 1951, in St. Peter Cathedral in Scranton Pennsylvania, Father Joseph Ferrario, with the permission of his bishop, become a Sulpician.

The once future-businessman was now a priest-teacher. His first assignment took him across the continent to California, to St. Joseph Seminary in Mountain View, near San Jose. For six years he taught high school seminarians math, Greek and reading.

St. Stephen Seminary

His director and confessor in California was Sulpician Father John Ward who told him about a seminary the Sulpicians had opened a few years earlier in the Territory of Hawaii. Father Ward asked Father Ferrario if he would be interested in teaching there.

Prior to that, the young priest’s only knowledge of Hawaii was that it was in the Pacific Ocean, and that, when he was 15-years-old, Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

Father Ward’s suggestion turned into an assignment to St. Stephen Seminary in Kaneohe. In May 1957, Father Ferrario found himself being greeted at the Honolulu airport by Father Ward, now the Hawaii seminary’s rector, and 10 seminarians.

“I immediately fell in love with the place,” the bishop recalled. “I have never found anything that could match it.”

For nine years at St. Stephen, Father Ferrario taught Greek, math, and English. It was the seminary’s heyday -- new dormitories and classrooms were being constructed and enrollment for the four years of high school and two years of college peaked in the early 1960s at 72 students.

Joining the diocese

By 1966, Father Ferrario had tired of teaching, but not of the idea of being a parish priest, and certainly not of Hawaii.

“I asked Bishop (James) Sweeney if I could stay here as a parish priest,” he said. The bishop said yes and sent him back to his home diocese of Scranton to ask his bishop’s permission to leave that diocese and join the Diocese of Honolulu. Permission was granted.

Bishop Sweeney soon became ill. Auxiliary Bishop John Scanlan became administrator of the diocese and then diocesan bishop when Bishop Sweeney died in 1968.

Ironically, despite the fact he had joined the diocese to work in a parish, Father Ferrario’s work as a parish priest would still be several years away. Instead, he was thrust into a series of diocesan administrative positions, which providentially would prepare him for greater things.

Bishop Scanlan appointed him as his personal secretary, which in those days was a live-in job with a high level of responsibility. Some of the duties he was given came with the times. It was the late 1960s and the liturgical renewal born of the Second Vatican Council was in full swing.

Bishop Scanlan put Father Ferrario in charge of the Diocesan Liturgical Commission. His interest in liturgy grew, continued into his own episcopacy, and remains a passion for him today.

From 1968 to 1971, the bishop handed him the reins to Project Hawaii, a $3.5 million diocesan fund-raising campaign.

Seventy-five percent of the money collected stayed in the parishes. “It purpose was mainly to strengthen the parishes,” Bishop Ferrario said, “It gave the parishes a real sense of who they were.”

However, the project, successful as it was, planted in the bishop’s secretary the seeds of an emerging concept called “stewardship,” a philosophy that sees the material support of the church as an attitude of involvement and gratitude rather than of pledge drives.

Stewardship would turn into another great passion for the future bishop.

Other administrative positions Father Ferrario held were Director of Vocations and president of the Priests’ Senate, a group that represented the clergy’s interests at the time. He was also appointed director of the Catholic Youth Organization.

The CYO flourished under his tenure, encompassing at the time the Department of Religious Education. Hundreds of children attended summer fun and weeklong camping experiences during the 1970s. For many Hawaii high school students, the Search retreat program became the foremost spiritual experience of their teen years.

Finally, a parish

Finally, in 1973, 22 years after his ordination as a diocesan priest, Father Ferrario landed a parish assignment -- as pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Kuliouou in east Honolulu.

“It was wonderful,” he said.

It was there that he was able to put into real practice the ideas he held dear -- those of liturgy and stewardship. “I had a chance to really work stewardship,” he said.

It was about much more than money. “We got the people involved. It was a changing, active parish. We did everything,” he said.

After two successful years at Holy Trinity, Father Ferrario was named pastor of St. Anthony in Kailua, taking over the Maryknoll-run parish after the death of its long-time pastor, Father Michael Henry.

Father Ferrario found his second experience as a pastor just as satisfying as his first, if not more so. Again, stewardship and liturgy became the corporal and spiritual backbones of his new parish community.

Auxiliary, then bishop

In 1977, Bishop Scanlan, at age 70, requested from the pope an auxiliary bishop. Father Ferrario was in the right place at the right time. A former teacher, a veteran diocesan administrator, a priest very well versed in the documents of Vatican II, a successful pastor, and a 20-year island resident, he was a natural candidate.

Pope Paul VI agreed. On Nov. 8, 1977, the pope appointed him auxiliary to Bishop Scanlan, and on Jan. 13, 1978, he was ordained as bishop.

He left St. Anthony Parish to reside at St. Stephen Diocesan Center and work at the chancery as Bishop Scanlan’s assistant and vicar general.

Then with Bishop Scanlan’s retirement in 1982, Bishop Ferrario was named by Pope John Paul II as the third diocesan Bishop of Honolulu. He was installed on June 29, 1982, at the Neal Blaisdell Center.

Though he would not realize it until later, the whole thrust of Bishop Ferrario’s episcopacy was literally spelled out, in a moment of grace, during his installation speech. He told those gathered that he had distilled his goals as bishop into three key words -- “unity,” “outreach,” and “renewal.”

In a few days later at a Mass in Hilo, during a visitation tour of the neighbor islands, the new bishop noticed a banner brought by the people of Honomu, a small mission community outside of Hilo. The banner had taken his three key words, switched around the first two, and lined up the first letters so that they spelled the word “OUR,” followed by the word “Church.”

“OUR (outreach, unity, renewal) Church” -- short and catchy -- became his message and his mission in a nutshell.

“It really grabbled hold,” the bishop said. “People had a sense that it was indeed OUR Church. It was evident in the way liturgy developed, and the way stewardship caught on, and how religious education progressed.”

The new bishop, at age 56, began a flurry of activity, visiting all the parishes, establishing seven vicariates, and new commissions for justice and peace, communications, youth, family life, and ecumenism.

He introduced a new two-year confirmation preparation program and formally established the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, or RCIA, as the process adults are brought into the church in Hawaii.

He wrote numerous pastoral letters. The topics were posture at Mass, Mass stipends for priests, parish membership, AIDS, the Eucharist and eucharistic devotion, vocations, Catholic social teaching and holy days of obligation.

He radically reorganized Catholic Charities, opened a diocesan Communications Center, a Family Life Office, and a Youth Office, established the Augustine Educational Foundation, launched a five-year parish renewal plan, and commissioned in-depth studies on demographics and Catholic schools.

He established St. Jude Parish in Makakilo, and Resurrection of the Lord Parish in Waipio-Gentry, and rededicated St. Theresa Church as a co-cathedral.

He ordained 19 priests.

Retirement

It was a busy and active administration, but the strain of 11-and-a-half years took its physical toll. In January of 1992, Bishop Ferrario underwent quintuple bypass surgery. “I began to realize what stress does to a person,” he said.

Within a year of his surgery, the bishop made a retreat, did some deep personal reflecting, and decided that it was time to retire or suffer the consequences. The pope accepted his letter of resignation and on Oct. 12, 1993, Bishop Ferrario left the Diocese of Honolulu in the hands a fellow Pennsylvanian who had never before been to Hawaii, Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo.

How’s Bishop Ferrario’s health now? “Excellent,” he said, with a help of medicine typically prescribed to one his age, and golf on Mondays and Thursdays.

He lives by himself in a modest house next door to St. Anthony Parish in Kailua where he helps out on a regular basis.

He spends about 20 hours a week at St. Stephen Diocesan Center as first vice-president and CEO of the Augustine Educational Foundation which is more than half way through a $6 million campaign to raise funds for Catholic School tuition assistance.

“I’m never bored,” he said.

The bishop is presently reading his way through a “fascinating” five-volume history of the Second Vatican Council.

Reflecting on the past five decades, he smiles. He said, that if someone had told him in the seminary the path he would take and where he would be today, he would never have believed him. “I could never have imagined it,” he said.

“I’ve enjoyed everything,” he said. “And I am really blessed here in Hawaii -- by the church, and by the people.”

“It’s really been a great experience, an amazing experience.”

And, for Bishop Ferrario, it all happened in the right place, at the right time.