Catholic Women’s Guild officers pose with Father Charles Lees in 1984, Virginia Gonsalves, Ruth Flynn, Irene Coogan, Stella Baughman and Georgi Walker. (HCH file photo)
By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
The Catholic Women’s Guild Hawaii, the Islands’ oldest Catholic charitable organization, has convened its last meeting. Fewer than 15 attended on Feb. 28 — not enough for a quorum — bleakly illustrating the main reason for the group’s demise.
An organization that used to make headlines on the society pages of the Honolulu dailies “has fully run its course,” wrote its president Patricia Alvarez in a letter to members this month.
Alvarez said that the guild’s board made the decision for dissolution at its Feb. 9 meeting where “it was observed that the Guild could not continue based on its present circumstances and minimal membership participation.”
Guild members Julie Braig, left, and Pat Desonier at the organization’s drop-in center for the homeless in Nanakuli. (HCH file photo)
She noted that the guild, which was founded five years before Damien de Veuster arrived in the Islands, had “contributed substantially, over its 160-year span, to our Catholic community and other organizations in the Islands.”
Also “substantial,” she said, is the amount of money the organization is leaving. It will be donated to other charitable Catholic organizations following a resolution the Guild passed in 1998.
“Former members were very generous,” Alvarez said. “Sums given to the guild have been augmented over the years through wise investments.”
“I am happy that the money will be put to good use,” she said.
Bishop Larry Silva, in a letter to the Catholic Women’s Guild dated May 1, expressed his “sadness” at the news of the organization’s disbanding.
“The work that you have done these past 160 years to support those who are in need has been formidable,” he said.
“You have touched many lives and given them hope because of your hard work in fundraising efforts, and mostly because of your caring and loving spirit,” Bishop Silva said.
According to the minutes of its first meeting, the organization was founded in 1859 by “22 native Catholic women” as an auxiliary of the Hawaiian Catholic Association, a men’s society based at Honolulu’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, to assist the first Sacred Hearts Sisters who had arrived that year from France. Anna Louisa Rhodes was its first president.
According to a story in the April 4, 1937, Honolulu Advertiser, much of the guild’s early years were spent as an altar society for the Fort Street cathedral, “decorating the altar, providing and caring for vestments and linens and occasionally helping a poor family.”
Need for charity
As the need for charity grew, the group became the Ladies Benevolent Association. Then in 1886, with the influx of Portuguese immigrants, who were mostly Catholic, the organization became the Portuguese Ladies Benevolent Association working for the “relief of all poor, crippled and destitute members to that nationality,” as reported by a newspaper at the time.
The guild makes the newspaper “Society” pages on its 100th anniversary.
From 1890, the guild was known as the Catholic Ladies Benevolent Association until 1901 when it was renamed the Catholic Ladies Aid Society.
In 1926, it became the Catholic Women’s Aid Society. In 1947, the St. Francis Hospital Guild, which was founded by Princess Abigail Kawananakoa in 1926, merged with the women’s society, which had become a strong supporter of the hospital.
In 1949, the group adopted the name Catholic Women’s Guild. “Hawaii” was tagged on later to distinguish the group from others on the mainland with a similar name.
Over the years, the guild both engaged in its own charitable activities and raised funds for other charitable organizations.
At Christmastime, the guild would collect Christmas toys for the children at St. Anthony Orphanage in Kalihi and fill food baskets for “needy families.”
The guild raised money to build a chapel in the vicinity of Kapiolani Park in Waikiki to serve the American soldiers of the Spanish American War passing through Hawaii from 1898 to 1899.
Dental clinics
One major guild project was organizing physical exams and immunization and vaccination drives for children in parochial schools, and setting up dental clinics for low-income families. Doctors and nurses would volunteer for these efforts. Many guild members were themselves nurses.
For many years, members sewed hundreds of first Communion outfits a year for the children of poor families and “reconditioned” thousands more.
In 1936, they adopted the cause of a Honolulu paraplegic named Bennie Gomes, raising money to buy him an electric wheelchair.
Longtime guild member and supporter Catherine Hughes. (HCH file photo)
Other activities included an anti-tuberculosis campaign in 1963, a lap robe project for care home residents in the 1980s, a mobile dental clinic from 1999 to 2009 and a Nanakuli “drop-in center” in 1992, which provided resources for the homeless.
In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the group’s fundraisers would likely be a tea and fashion show at Washington Place, hosted by the governor’s wife, with entertainment by the Royal Hawaiian Band. The Guild raised money for St. Francis Hospital, St. Anthony Orphanage, and once for the preservation of the famed “Painted Church,” St. Benedict in Honaunau.
Other donations went to the Pearson Foundation for unwed mothers and Family Promise Hawaii.
Stories and pictures of guild events routinely made the society and women’s pages that used to be a part of daily newspapers. Among its members and sponsors were names like Dillingham, Burns, Blaisdell and Campbell.
The women, who at one time numbered in the hundreds, did not have to be Catholic. Besides charitable works, the group also got together for lectures, study groups, social and spiritual activities.
Changing times
But times have changed.
“The Guild served a very important function at one time but it doesn’t have the membership or leadership to continue in that vein,” Alvarez said.
“It really was founded to do charitable work that now Catholic Charities [the agency] does,” Alvarez said. It flourished at a time when most married women did not work outside the home and when single women had lots of spare time.
The guild president was circumspect when asked how old the guild’s membership was. It is an organization of “my mother’s generation,” she said, adding, “I am 75.”
Another “significant” factor in the dissolving of the guild, Alvarez said, was the Jan. 27 death at age 90 of long-time member Catherine Hughes. Hughes was staunchly devoted to the guild. Her efforts in preserving its history, recruiting new members and keeping it relevant, helped sustain the organization in its final years.
“Her mother had been a member,” Alvarez said of Hughes’ loyalty. “She made it her cause. She had wanted the best for the Guild.”
Hughes made it her goal to collect all the organization’s archival records, which are now available to researchers at the University of Hawaii’s Hamilton Library.
“Someday a history of the organization will be written,” said Alvarez.
Longtime member Phyllis Zerbe is thankful for the organization’s impact on the community.
“We cherish all of the Guild’s many successful years,” she told the Hawaii Catholic Herald by phone May 2. “Years of loyalty, of kindness, of generosity, of dedication to our community.”
“The Guild has a tremendous history,” said Zerbe, whose mother also was a member. “We thank the Lord for his love and his guidance over the years.”
“It is time now to move onward and to thank all of our great and prominent dedicated members who lead our organization in the early years. They did so much to keep it going,” she said.
