Hawaii-born Sacred Hearts Father Clyde Guerreiro, recent pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows in Wahiawa and St. Damien Parish on Molokai, will travel to Tonga later this month to help start a new mission for the Sacred Hearts Fathers and Brothers.
Sacred Hearts Father Clyde Guerreiro
Over the next few months, Father Guerreiro and three other Sacred Hearts priests from different parts of the world will form a community on the outskirts of Tonga’s capital city of Nuku’alofa to do parish work, teach, and train new members of the Sacred Hearts order.
Sacred Hearts Father Chris Kaitapu, a native Tongan, will be the pastor and community superior. He was the first to arrive at the mission last month.
Father Guerreiro expects to be in Tonga on March 25. Between now and then he will be assisting at a parish on the East coast for a couple of weeks before returning to Hawaii for his trip to Tonga.
The other two Sacred Hearts priests are Father Subal Nayak, a member of the Indian region the Sacred Hearts U.S. province, and Father Paul Zaccone, who had left Hawaii for Massachusetts a year ago to be congregation’s director of vocations.
According to Father Guerreiro, Father Nayak will arrive in May and Father Zaccone, who will teach high school in Tonga, will join them in August.
Father Kaitapu ties to the Sacred Hearts order goes back to 1988 when he came to Hawaii to join the congregation as a seminarian, Father Guerreiro said. When visa difficulties prevented his staying, he trained for the priesthood for the Diocese of Tonga and later took vows as a Sacred Hearts Father in the Philippines.
The congregation’s move to Tonga was made possible when the 2011 merger of its Hawaii and East Coast provinces into the single United States Province gave the order the extra manpower and flexibility to expand its mission base.
The merger joined Hawaii’s 15 priests and six brothers with the East Coast’s 31 priests and three brothers. The province also has an India region with 12 priests.
Long-standing invitation
Father Guerreiro said the congregation’s initial invitation to work in Tonga actually came several years ago from then Tongan Bishop Soane Lilo Foliaki. After Bishop Foliaki retired in 2008, the new Bishop Soane Patita Paini Mafi repeated the invitation.
Father Hurrell, reached last week by phone from New Zealand, said the opportunity “is a bit of a godsend.”
He said the decision to accept the invitation was made last fall after about a month’s “discernment” on the part of the congregation and its governing body.
The Hawaii men were from the start “overwhelmingly positive” at the prospect, he said, but the members of the former East Coast province, which had just closed a mission in the Bahamas, approached the idea more cautiously.
Father Guerreiro called the congregation’s return to the missions “kind of like a renaissance.”
Missionary work is a “recognizable core value of who we are,” he said.
According to Father Hurrell, the new undertaking will be based at the parish of St. Michael which also has two other small rundown mission churches, he said. The priests will do parish work, adult religious education, teaching, social ministry and the training of clergy and seminarians.
Two Tongans have already expressed interest in joining the community, Father Hurrell said.
He added that the new mission coincides with the congregation’s new youth and young adult program, which will send two lay volunteers to Tonga for a one-year commitment and perhaps the opportunity to “discern a vocation with us.”
Father Guerreiro said the new community hopes to have a house that will accommodate the four priests, plus guests and eventually seven seminarians.
Tonga currently does not have formation program for seminarians. Diocesan seminarians train in Fiji.
The Sacred Hearts Fathers have a five-year contract with the Diocese of Tonga after which their mission will be evaluated and, it is hoped, renewed.
A nation of 176 islands
Father Guerreiro said he has some familiarity with Tonga. He visited there for the ordination of Father Kaitapu. One of Hawaii’s Sacred Hearts priests, Father Marisi Palepale, who is Samoan-Tonga, works in the Philippines. Also, for a brief time in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the order had two Tongan seminarians.
“It’s about 6-7-hour plane ride,” Father Guerreiro said. “You can’t go directly. You have to go through Fiji or go to New Zealand and ‘backpaddle.’”
He described Nuku’alofa as an “overgrown Kaunakakai” or a “smaller Lihue.”
Father Hurrell, who was born in New Zealand, is himself one quarter Tongan, plus a mix of European nationalities and Chinese. He spent about 15 years of his youth growing up in Tonga.
Tonga is a constitutional monarchy made up of 176 islands, of which about 50 are inhabited, spread across 270,000 square miles of ocean. The people speak Tongan and English.
The country lies about 3,000 miles southwest of Hawaii, 2,000 miles east of Australia and 500 miles south of Samoa.
The prominent religion is Protestant.
According to Catholic Church records, in 2010 Tonga had 13,367 Catholics, or 12.9 percent of a total population of 103,391. In 2010, the Diocese of Tonga had 29 diocesan priests, nine religious priests and 14 parishes.
Bishop Paini, 51, a native Tongan, took charge of the diocese in 2008.
Excitement all around
“I am terribly excited (about going), I really am,” said Father Guerreiro, who will turn 64 on March 11. “Father Johnathan thinks I still got a little bit of adventurer in me.”
Also “very excited,” Father Hurrell said, is Tonga itself where he said the priests’ arrival is “front page news.”
Father Guerreiro has served both as a pastor and congregational leader in his more than three and a half decades as a priest in Hawaii.
He worked at St. Ann, Kaneohe, St. Michael in Waialua, Immaculate Conception in Lihue, St. Damien Parish on Molokai and Our Lady of Sorrows in Wahiawa. He was provincial of the Sacred Hearts Fathers and Brothers in Hawaii for two separate six-year periods and also spent about nine months overseeing the training of priesthood candidates in Washington, D.C.
The Sacred Hearts Congregation had also received an invitation to serve in the Cook Islands, also in the South Pacific, but the arrangement would have required the priests to live on separate islands, which would not be conducive to religious community life. The Hawaii province in the 1980s had sent Father Lane Akiona and Father James Anguay to the Cooks, but “that experience just did not work out,” Father Guerreiro said.
Hawaii’s Sacred Hearts Sisters sent Hawaii missionaries to India 25 years ago. They are still there.
