Father Patrick H. Freitas (HCH file photo)
Maui-born priest was a dedicated pastor, staunch religious educator
By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
Maui-born Father Patrick H. Freitas, who felt exceedingly privileged to be in the first generation of priests to implement the Second Vatican Council, a man of spiritual intensity and a self-described “happy learner,” died Oct. 18 in a Waipahu care home. He was 82 and a priest of the Diocese of Honolulu for 57 years.
His long years of service to the diocese was split between parish work and religious education with several years spent at the Office for Clergy as the director of vocations.
Funeral services are pending.
Msgr. Gary Secor, vicar general, first met Father Freitas when the monsignor was a teenager helping out at his home parish of St. John Vianney in Kailua, Father Freitas’ first assignment. “So I knew him well,” he said. “I have good memories of Father Pat.”
“He was a very dedicated priest,” he said. “I don’t know of any priest who worked harder than Father Freitas. He was a perfectionist.”
“In a good sense,” he added. “He mellowed in his later years.”
Upon his retirement in 2012, Father Freitas wrote, “Reviewing the years past, how truly exciting were those years of active priesthood – riding, as it happened, on the cusp of the full energy and challenge of the (Second Vatican) Council and a time of great richness in the life of the church.
“Together, our church and our Hawaii – we were changing! And, in it all, what great pleasure it was to be a partner with so many wonderful and, dare I say, forgiving people. We were learning together how to be and express the new sense of church.
“A persistent feeling of gratitude – that’s there! Loads of it! But, in a particularly existential way, there is an attendant and saving sense of always being called to be a happy learner in the unfolding of each day and each particular assignment.”
Father Freitas was born on Dec. 12, 1939, in Puunene, Maui, to Edmund and Mary Pires Freitas. He has one sister, Henriette Monk of Maui.
He attended St. Stephen Seminary near Kailua, graduating in 1957, and St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park, California.
He was ordained on June 12, 1965, by Bishop James J. Sweeney at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.
Father Freitas served as an associate pastor for his first two assignments, St. John Vianney, Kailua, and Our Lady of Good Counsel, Pearl City, before being appointed to the diocesan Department of Religious Education for six years, first as associate director, then as director.
Priests commemorating their ordination anniversaries concelebrate Mass at St. Theresa Co-Cathedral April 25, 2015. From left to right are Father Joseph Carroll, Father Patrick Freitas, Sacred Hearts Father Christopher Keahi, Marianist Father Paul Fitzpatrick and Father Emerson Delos Reyes. (HCH photos | Darlene Dela Cruz)
He left Hawaii in 1979 to work and study in California, returning in 1982 to be associate pastor of St. Anthony in Kailua, followed by assignments at Holy Trinity, Kuliouou, and Holy Family in Honolulu.
In 1987, he went to the Office of Clergy as the diocesan director of vocations, initiating the “Called by Name” program.
Then it was back to parish work interspersed with catechetical ministry and diocesan educational ministry.
At his last pastoral assignment, as pastor of St. Rita Church in Haiku, Maui, he laid the groundwork, through quiet negotiation, for the purchase of the land on which the church stood, which had been leased for nearly a century.
He retired in 2012. A few years later, what his doctors initially thought was a stroke turned out to be fast-progressing Parkinson’s disease.
In 2020, he moved from his apartment at One Archer Lane to an assisted living residential home in Waipahu.
The once active and articulate priest was left to communicating in the softest of whispers, watching Mass on television and waiting for a priest from St. Joseph Parish in Waipahu to bring him Holy Communion.
He gave his chalice to St. John Vianney Parish.
He said two years ago that “the illness has reduced his life to “just one note, one rhythm, one intensity. It’s a whole different world. You do the best you can do.”
Misconstruing a priest’s accent
Father Patrick Freitas wrote this reflection in 2015 on the occasion of his 50th anniversary of ordination to the priesthood.
“As a shy youngster, reared in the plantation village of Puunene (Maui), I remember puzzling over the apparent need, should I become a priest, that new speech patterns would have to be learnt. At the time I had not realized that what I thought to be an essential part of priesthood was merely a European ‘accent’ characteristic of the missionary priests of the Sacred Hearts.
“Yet the challenge of these years was yet to be found in learning how to be father, to lead and serve, but with a mother’s heart. Such has been the insight and joy that emerged after being blessed with these full years of priestly service within the family of our diocesan church.
“Ordained at the time of the Second Vatican Council, the Spirit-appointed task of implementing the vision of a renewing church fell uniquely to my generation of priests. Looking back, we functioned as a catalyst of “change” — to engage and refocus our local communities into a renewed wholeness in Christ, to rediscover the ancient richness of our life together and to be the attentive midwife in service to the world.
“Those were rich years of life and labor, travail and growth — still unfinished, still beckoning us into the future. A link in the chain — thanks to the graciousness of God!”
