This photo of Sister Cecilia Santos was taken Feb. 21 when she celebrated her 75th anniversary as a Maryknoll Sister two days before traveling to New York. (Photo courtesy of the Maryknoll Sisters)
Maryknoller wanted to be a foreign missionary from grade 1
Sister Cecilia Rose Santos, the Maui-born Maryknoll missionary who served more than 40 years in Chile, died March 18 at the Maryknoll Sisters Center in New York. She was 93 and was celebrating her 75th anniversary in religious life this year.
She had been a member of the Maryknoll Sisters community in Manoa until Feb. 23 when she moved to the Maryknoll Motherhouse in New York for medical care. She donated her body to New York Medical College.
Her first duties as a Maryknoll Sister were teaching assignments at St. Anthony School in Kalihi, St. Michael School in Waialua, St. Anthony School in Wailuku and St. Augustine School in Waikiki. She was then missioned to Chile where she worked in a variety of ministries.
The late Sacred Hearts Sister Dorothy Santos was her biological sister. She died in 2018.
Sister Santos was born on Maui on Jan. 30, 1929.
“We lived on a cattle ranch, Grove Ranch, in Makawao,” Sister Santos, the youngest of 11 children, recalled in a Hawaii Catholic Herald interview six years ago. “I was a professional horseback rider, bicycle rider, runner and everything you could think of. I was always climbing trees and making my mother worry. I was a real tomboy. As the youngest, I feel I missed a whole lot as my elder siblings kept leaving home as they grew up.”
“My assignment to Chile was a surprise and a great joy,” she said on the 70th anniversary of religious life. There she was a school teacher for 18 years and did pastoral work for 35 years.
Upon her retirement in Hawaii, she volunteered at St. Pius X Parish food pantry in Manoa where she made sandwiches, cooked breakfast, prepared bags of food and sorted used clothing.
Though Sister Santos felt called to religious life at an early age, she did not follow her Sister Dorothy into the Congregation of the Sacred Heart, because, she said, she did not want to wake up at 3 a.m. to join in perpetual adoration. However, she did exactly that as a Maryknoller and came to love those quiet hours of prayer.
She felt the yearning to be a missionary in the first grade at St. Anthony School in Wailuku. “I watched the Maryknoll Sisters who taught us and I had a great desire to go out to China, to go out to Africa, to go out somewhere to tell the whole world that Jesus is risen and loves everyone. I was full of fervor at that age.”
“But I didn’t want anyone to know I wanted to become a nun. Somehow though they knew and would tease me. I would get very angry and say, ‘I’m not going to become a nun.’”
Sister Santos thanked her parents and family for supporting her desire to be a missionary, and the “Maryknoll Sisters who first taught me and continue to be my inspiration.”
“I also would like to thank those in Chile who taught me so much during my 40 years working among them, she said. “We missionaries used to think that we are being sent to serve, but I have found that the people do more for me than I do for them.”
