Father Alapaki Kim celebrates Mass in an undated photo. (HCH file photo)
By Celia K. Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
With a twinkle in his eye and a deep love for Hawaii — his ancestral home — Father Alapaki Kim touched countless lives as he served communities both near and far.
He worked tirelessly to incorporate Hawaiian culture, language and traditions into the church. He nurtured a love of music in young people. He connected with and cared for people wherever he went, whether it was West Virginia (after his ordination as a Paulist priest) or the Big Island (where he served as associate pastor of Malia Puka O Kalani Parish in Keaukaha) or St. Rita Parish in Nanakuli — his final assignment before he retired as pastor last year.
Father Kim, who battled health problems in his final years, died peacefully May 8 at his hanai sister’s home in Keaau. He was 71 years old.
Kathy Baybayan, whose Big Island home became Father Kim’s after his retirement, said she and her husband, Glenn, were with Father Kim when he passed away and that “he didn’t suffer.”
Life-changing moment
Father Kim was already well-traveled by the time he returned to Hawaii for good in 1993. His father was in the Army, so the Kim family moved often — Father Kim was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1953, while one of his three biological sisters, Mamo, was born in Japan.
Father Kim’s father was Korean American and his mother was Native Hawaiian, with roots in Maui and the Big Island. Though his family relocated frequently in his early life, they eventually landed on Oahu’s Windward side. Father Kim attended Kailua schools until his high school graduation.
His life changed when he moved to Milwaukee to attend Marquette University, from which he graduated in 1975 with a liberal arts degree. According to Mamo Kim, his time at the Jesuit university helped move him toward the priesthood.
“He told me it was like a calling,” Mamo Kim said. “I knew he had made up his mind and he found that he just had this comfort there; he just felt it was right.”
Father Kim professed his first vows with the Paulist Fathers in 1977. While in the Paulists’ formation program, he ministered to a wide range of communities in places such as Massachusetts, South Carolina, New York and Toronto, Canada. He worked with migrant farm workers, with youth and at hospitals before heading to San Francisco’s Chinatown for his deacon year before ordination.
He returned to New York and was ordained on May 22, 1977 — the feast day of St. Rita, a fact that Karen Victor, the religious education director of St. Rita Parish in Nanakuli, said made Father Kim chuckle at the way the Holy Spirit moves.
His first assignment as a Paulist priest wasn’t in New York, though, but in West Virginia. There he worked with the campus ministry at West Virginia University in Morgantown; with youth in Osage; with disadvantaged people in the Appalachia region surrounding Morgantown; and at St. John University Parish, which serves WVU.
According to Victor, West Virginia was far from where he thought he wanted to be.
“However, thanks to the Holy Spirit, once he got to Morgantown … he recognized that it was where he needed to be in order to learn all the tough details about ministering to folks and running a parish and loving people and staying true to his vocation,” Victor said.
After five years in West Virginia, Father Kim went to Chicago and ministered at various sites in the city’s Loop, or downtown, area. He worked at Old St. Mary’s Parish, was a college chaplain, was coordinator of liturgy and participated in numerous programs to benefit the faithful and the less fortunate.
Finally returning home
Another five years passed and it was time for Father Kim’s next assignment. In 1993, after many years on the mainland, he returned home to Hawaii to serve as chaplain at the University of Hawaii-Hilo and as associate pastor of Malia Puka O Kalani Parish in Keaukaha.
“He petitioned to be placed in Hawaii at the time when the diocese was recognizing its need for a Native Hawaiian pastoral sensibility,” Victor said.
Father Kim embraced his time at Malia Puka O Kalani, where he spoke Hawaiian daily and served the community with communal gardens and a food pantry. While on the Big Island he also took care of his hanai son, Owali Littlejohn, according to Victor.
In 1998 Father Kim was assigned to St. Rita in Nanakuli — “and the rest is history!” Victor said.
(During his first years at St. Rita, Father Kim asked to be incardinated into the Diocese of Honolulu rather than remain a Paulist priest, so he could stay in Hawaii instead of be assigned to a parish elsewhere.)
St. Rita was where Father Kim’s impact on the Catholic Church in Hawaii really became known. He encouraged the use of olelo Hawaii — the Hawaiian language — in Mass as well as the implementation of hula, permissible as sacred gesture during worship.
“Father Alapaki was very committed to expressing the Catholic faith in the cultural texture of Native Hawaiians,” said Bishop Larry Silva.
One of the last projects he pursued was translating the Eucharistic prayers into olelo Hawaii, though he knew it was a task that likely would extend beyond his years.
Franciscan Father Mike Dalton, who knew Father Kim well from their time as neighbors in the Leeward Vicariate (Father Dalton at Immaculate Conception in Ewa, Father Kim at St. Rita), said his friend wasn’t worried about the length of the project.
“As long as it got completed that would be fine with him,” Father Dalton said. “He approached this project with passion and compassion … like he did with everything in his life.”
Many lives touched
Above all Father Kim strove to support the faithful and the wider community in Nanakuli.
“Father Alapaki had a real sense of ohana in which everyone was an important member of the parish,” Bishop Silva said. “I cannot tell you the number of mainland visitors who commented to me about how welcome they felt at St. Rita, and they would look forward to attending Mass there whenever they were on island.
“They experienced the best of Native Hawaiian culture with Father Alapaki and his parish ohana.”
Another hallmark of Father Kim was his strong personality, which was deeply passionate, energetic, gentle and loving all at once.
“It’s not so much that he was a force of nature, but that he was so himself that he was exactly who God had made him to be,” Victor said.
Mamo Kim recalled her brother as being sensitive to situations when they were young, in a way that reflected the compassion he felt for those around him.
“He was something, he was really something else,” she said. “He had a very good heart; he was really strong that way.”
“And he always loved to laugh,” Kim said. “He was just a really funny, affable guy.”
“Yes, he could lose his temper, but I think people will remember him as someone with a strong personality who could always make people laugh.”
Father Dalton, who is now pastor of Holy Trinity Parish in Kuliouou, and Victor both recalled Father Kim’s penchant for travel, which included dedicated trips to the Big Island after
Easter to attend the Merrie Monarch Festival; Thanksgiving vacations; and flights to Minnesota with St. Rita youth to attend an annual music ministry summer program.
“Once while we were both attending the Merrie Monarch Festival, we visited the many vendors who were there prior to the hula competitions,” Father Dalton recalled. “It was at that time that he no longer was able to walk, so he got around on his little red scooter.
“As we ventured through the area, I was touched by how many people knew who he was and would just call out, ‘Aloha, Father Paki, so good that you are with us again.’ Yes, they enjoyed that he was ‘with them’ again. He was known by hundreds if not thousands of people … and will be missed by us all.”
Victor said she is grateful that Father Kim “counted me as one of his sheep … and that he encouraged me to follow the Good Shepherd.”
“What he did for me, he has done for so many people, parishioners and visitors alike; they love Father Paki for the way he welcomed them into the parish and into the church.”
Service information
Services for Father Kim are planned for late June. His wake is scheduled for June 27 at the Co-Cathedral of St. Theresa in Honolulu. His funeral will take place the next day at the co-cathedral.
