Former Navy chaplain served 16 years as pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul
By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
Jesuit Father David O. Travers, who served as pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Parish in Honolulu’s Ala Moana district for 16 years, died June 14 in the Jesuits’ Campion Health and Wellness center in Weston, Massachusetts. He was 86 and a priest for 52 years. His death was not associated with the coronavirus, according to the Jesuit USA Northeast Province website.
Sts. Peter and Paul Church was Father Travers’ last official Hawaii assignment. He retired at age 77 in 2012 after which he continued to offer his services wherever he was needed.
“I love what I do,” he told the Hawaii Catholic Herald at the time. “As long as I can help out and my health is good, I will be available.”
Bishop Larry Silva remembers the Jesuit as being “very well loved at Sts. Peter and Paul Church. He was very devoted to his parishioners.”
“Even when he began to be forgetful during Mass, people were concerned but did not want him removed because they had great love for him,” the bishop said.
Retired Deacon Richard Port, who served many years at Sts. Peter and Paul, said Father Travers was a “very pastoral” priest.
“Father Dave Travers was the second longest-serving pastor in the 50-year history of Sts. Peter and Paul Church,” Deacon Port said is an email. “He made himself available to any parishioner who wanted to meet with him.”
“During his time as pastor, he made sure to show his support for the parish’s RCIA program and the parish’s religious education program,” he said. “All the parishioners who knew him remember him as a loving priest.”
Yvonne Toma, Sts. Peter and Paul faith formation director, said her first acquaintance with the man she called “Father Dave” was through the celebration of Sunday Masses.
“As I became involved with the faith formation religious education at the parish, I got to know Father Dave as a very gentle individual who enjoyed visiting the classrooms and engaging in what the children were doing,” Toma said.
“He was liked by all,” she said.
Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 27, 1934, Father Travers joined the Jesuits New England Province in 1955 in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was ordained at Boston College in 1968. Two years later, in 1970, he joined the Navy Reserves as a chaplain.
Father Travers was 42 when he went on active duty in 1976, missing the Vietnam War by one year. But it was the Vietnam War the led him to military service.
“When I was ordained in 1968, Vietnam was at its highest,” he said, recalling his years as a chaplain in a 2012 story in the Hawaii Catholic Herald. “I saw so many young people killed in Vietnam and the thought occurred to me, ‘Was there a priest available to them?’”
Father Travers’ service took him to Okinawa, Guam, Maine, and Hawaii, among other places, and two-and-a-half years on an aircraft carrier.
His closest brush with combat was during the Iranian crisis of the 1980s in the North Arabian Sea on the carrier Enterprise whose planes were being sent to “take out” Iranian ships.
As the command chaplain on the Enterprise, Father Travers also served several of the carrier’s smaller accompanying warships. Every Sunday he would go from ship to ship, lowered by cable from a helicopter, to say Mass.
“And I am petrified of heights — I think curbstones are high,” he joked.
Of the people he served, Father Travers said, “They are very, very dedicated people. Nobody likes war and yet, they know they have an obligation to defend the country and defend the ideals that each of us lives by.”
Father Travers came to Hawaii in 1990, serving at the Marine Corps Air Station in Kaneohe before being invited to be the pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul in 1996.
“Modesty prevents me from saying that it is the best parish in the diocese,” he said in 2012. “It is a very, very friendly parish, the people are active and it has a very active outreach.”
“I just thoroughly enjoy being part of the diocese and enjoyed being a part of the parish,” he said. “The people are the nicest people I know.”
