NEWS FROM PAGES PAST
50 years ago — Jan. 3, 1964
Players in the forthcoming production, “The Damien Letter,” discuss their various roles between rehearsals. Gertrude Roberts, Marjorie Brim, and Helen Topham as Franciscan nuns, talk with John Kernell as Father Damien. This dramatic production, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s defense of Father Damien, was written by Mrs. Aldyth Morris. It opens this evening at Ruger Theater and will end on January 11 after six performances. (Stephen Moore Photo)
25 years ago — Jan. 6, 1989
Vicar to examine outreach to Nicaragua, Philippines
Jim Good and Ted Paiva are two Big Island Catholics who have worked for a private aid group in Nicaragua for the past two years. Father Clyde Phillips is a Hilo boy now working as a Maryknoll priest in Manila. Father James Orsini, pastor of St. Joseph Church, Hilo, and vicar for the Big Island, is looking for ways to offer a global missionary dimension to his parish and perhaps the whole island.
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Well, it doesn’t come together all that simply as anyone who’s been reading the newspapers for the past few years knows. But Father Orsini is willing to find out the possibilities of sending a little help to two places racked with poverty and violence. He and his associate pastor, Father Gilbert DeRitis, M.M., leave for Nicaragua next week Thursday. Father Phillips, in Hilo for a Christmas visit, will soon return to his missionary work in the Philippines to explore ways his home parish can help over there.
10 years ago — Jan. 2, 2004
Aloha, Bishop Joe
Bishop Joseph Anthony Ferrario was laid to rest at 2 p.m., Dec. 19, under partially overcast skies on the ocean-side slope of Hawaiian Memorial Park’s highest point, about 50 yards from where the statue of Jesus, hands outstretched, faces the rugged Koolau cliffs. It’s a spot where many of his brother priests are buried. From it you can practically see the place, a few miles up the highway, where the bishop worked as a young seminary teacher when he first arrived in the islands nearly 50 years ago. …
The ritual marked the end of a life, but not the legacy, of a man whose impact still reverberates from within and beyond the Catholic Church in Hawaii to the many private lives he touched with a word, a smile, an act of charity.
