By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
The Newman Center/Holy Spirit Parish will remain at its present location on the mauka end of the University of Hawaii at Manoa at least for another 12 years.
The fate of the parish had been up in the air ever since the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann communities closed Saint Francis School next door five years ago and put the campus property up for sale. The Newman Center, the hub of UH-Manoa campus ministry, sits on that land.
“It’s safe to say that the center will have a lease until April 30, 2036,” said Marlene DeCosta, diocesan director of real estate. “What happens beyond that will depend on who the owner is at that time and their plans.”
Sister Jeanne Weisbeck, general minister of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, and her leadership team announced the sale to the sisters and staff of the congregation shortly before the sale was made public this month.
“We are pleased to announce that we have closed on the sale of our Manoa campus in Hawaii!” she wrote. “The sale takes place almost four years to the day we put the property on the market.”
“The buyer is the Avalon Group, a real estate company that owns and manages properties in Hawaii,” Sister Weisbeck said. “We are especially pleased that the company is Hawaii-based and woman-owned. The company’s initial plans for the property are to build single-family residences.”
The purchase price for the 11.1-acre property is $23.35 million.
According to Rochelle Cassella, Director of Communications for the Sisters of St. Francis, “There is a ground lease with the diocese for the Newman Center/Holy Spirit Parish. That was assigned to Avalon as part of the sale.”
Christine Camp, Avalon president and CEO, confirmed the lease arrangement in an email to the Hawaii Catholic Herald.
Father Alfred Omar Guerrero, pastor of Newman Center/Holy Spirit Parish, said he was “grateful for Avalon Development and Christine Camp for allowing us to complete the lease term established more than 40 years ago.”
He also wanted to “acknowledge the generosity of the Sisters of St. Francis for allowing the diocese to build the present Newman Center building back in the 1980s.
“With some stability now, we are working on our five-year pastoral plan and completing some of the deferred maintenance put off during those years of uncertainty — 2019-2023.
Father Guerrero added that the diocese “surrendered the Dever House, the adjoining priest residence, to the Sisters of St. Francis at the close of the sale,” and that he now resides at Sacred Heart Church in Makiki.
“The sale of the Manoa campus has been a challenging journey of prayer, perseverance and patience,” said Sister Weisbeck. “Just weeks after listing the campus for sale, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Hawaii was closed to visitors, making it impossible for potential buyers to visit the site.”
Other factors further delayed the eventual sale, she said, including an initial offer that “fell through.”
Founded by the Franciscan Sisters as an all-girls school in 1924, Saint Francis officially started accepting boys in 2006 in order to make the school more competitive among Oahu’s private schools. It graduated its first co-ed high school class in 2013.
But dwindling enrollment continued to put a financial strain on the school.
“Simply put there is not enough money to continue,” Sister Barbara Jean Donovan, general minister for the Syracuse-based Sisters of St. Francis, said at the time.
When it closed in 2019, the school had an enrollment of 452 K-12 students and a staff of 68.
University of Hawaii Catholic campus ministry formally dates back to the 1950s. Its first chaplains were Father John McDonald and Msgr. Daniel Dever, long before the present-day Newman Center building was dedicated in the early 1980s. From the 1980s to the early 2010s, Jesuit priests oversaw the parish until the religious order left the islands.
In 2011, Diocese of Honolulu priests took over the administration of the parish.
In February 2019, Saint Francis School announced its closure. A year later the property was put up for sale, with the Newman Center fearing a potential rent hike or relocation as a result.
