THE MARRIED LIFE
The Hawaii Catholic Herald welcomes a new local columnist, Mary Duddy, who will write on marriage and family issues, topics with which she is very familiar. She won’t necessarily appear in every issue, but as inspiration strikes. Here is her introduction.
My husband Tom and I came to Hawaii on orders from the U.S. Navy in 1980, just 11 months after we were married and two months before our first child was born. We decided to stay because of our involvement in the People of Praise, a Christian, largely Catholic, community.
Tom was a medical corpsman and was first assigned to a clinic at the Kaneohe Marine Corps Base. Three years later he began a tour of sea duty on the USS Harold E. Holt out of Pearl Harbor. Because of our growing family and the prolonged separations associated with sea duty, Tom left the Navy after 10 years of service in 1985. A few months later he got a job as a medical paralegal at a Honolulu law firm, where he continues to work.
We have three children, all born in Hawaii, and six grandchildren.
After college I worked for the North Carolina Catholic diocesan newspaper as journalist. Following marriage I was an at-home mom and for a while homeschooled our young children. When our children entered Catholic school I returned to work to help pay tuition, I worked at St. John the Baptist parish for six years, and for the past 15 years I’ve been working for the Diocese of Honolulu in the tribunal office. I work with Father Mark Gantley, a canon lawyer, mostly helping process marriage paperwork for what is commonly called annulments, and facilitating other marriage related processes.
I come from an Irish-American family of 10 children, brought up in the Catholic faith. Tom comes from a family of four, also Irish-American, brought up in the Catholic faith. Both of us have been active in our faith since our high school years; it was one of the things that attracted us to one another initially.
Several years ago some leaders in the People of Praise community developed a program called the Marriage in Christ Seminar to help strengthen Christian marriages. Tom and I were impressed with the program so we underwent training to offer the seminar in Hawaii.
So far we have put on seven seminars, most at St. John Vianney Parish, all very well received. After working at the tribunal and seeing so many things that can go wrong in marriages it is refreshing to do something to help marriages go right.
In the future, Tom and I would like to train other couples to put on the seminar in their own parishes.
Mary Duddy works for the Diocese of Honolulu’s office of the Tribunal and Canonical Affairs as moderator of the tribunal and as a notary public. If you have any suggestions for topics you would like Mary to write about, contact her at mary_duddy@rcchawaii.org.
