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HILO -- God may listen to prayers, but it seems he sometimes likes to read them, too. Statue proves it:
Some prayers
are answered
By Rod Thompson
Star-BulletinA written prayer for nuns to teach girls was part of the efforts that brought the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis to Hilo a bit more than 100 years ago.
St. Joseph School will celebrate the arrival of the nuns in ceremonies tomorrow. A centerpiece of the ceremonies will be a small iron statue of St. Joseph which sheltered the written prayer for many years.
After Marianist priests opened a boarding school in Hilo for boys in 1848, a feeling grew that there should be a similar school for girls, said former school board Chairman Stephen Woo.
Prayers were finally answered with the opening of a school for girls on Sept. 6, 1900.
Sometime later -- the records are not clear when -- a 2-foot-high statue of St. Joseph was moved from its position at a now-gone church on Keawe Street.
Inside the hollow statue, parishioners discovered a prayer written by a Marianist father in the late 1800s asking for teaching nuns.
The statue will be installed in a small garden in front of St. Joseph High School tomorrow.
What became of the slip of paper is unknown, although it may be stashed away in the archives of the Franciscan order in Syracuse, N.Y., said school Principal Leroy Andrews.
From the delay between establishing the boys' school and the girls' school, it appears the extra prayer was warranted.
In 1883, King Kalakaua asked the Catholic Church to send nuns to help leprosy patients, according to a history of the Franciscan order by Mother M. Carmela.
Father Leonor Fouesnel sailed to San Francisco, then traveled across the United States, but was unsuccessful in his mission until he discovered the young Franciscan order -- then 23 years old -- in Syracuse.
The Sisters eventually established St. Francis Medical Center in Honolulu.
In 1892, Bishop Gulstan Ropert arrived from San Francisco and renewed the vision of a school for girls.
Because the Franciscans believed that the home is the first school, there would be no boarding at the new school.
The school was built for a little more than $9,000, and four sisters began teaching there. Over the years, 140 members of the order have taught at the school, said Sister Stephen Marie.
Four nuns began the school, and Sister Stephen Marie is one of four nuns who remain as the school has increasingly hired lay teachers.
A member of the local Serrao family, Sister Stephen Marie said the story of the statue was new to her.
"I'm local, but I never got to see the history until we started digging up things now," she said.
