Hawaii Catholic Herald
Clarence Richard Silva was born on Aug. 6, 1949, at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu, the third of Richard and Catherine Silva’s five children. He was baptized six days later at St. Anthony Church in Kailua. He was named after his uncle, his mother’s brother, a pilot lost during World War II.
Bishop Silva’s great-grandparents came to Hawaii as children from the island of Sao Miguel in the Portuguese Azores, part of a wave of immigrants who settled in the kingdom of Hawaii in the 1870s to work in the islands’ sugar plantations.
Bishop Silva’s father traces his island roots to Kauai where his grandfather,
born in Koloa, married a woman from Kekaha.
His maternal grandfather, Antonio Alves, was born in Haiku, Maui. His grandmother, Gussie Santos Alves, was born in Honolulu.
The bishop’s father was baptized at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, his mother at St. Agnes Church in Kakaako.
When he was born, his parents lived at 845 Kawainui St. in Kailua. When he was a year old his family moved to the Bay Area in northern California.
His father was an electrician and later a refrigeration and air conditioning mechanic. His mother was a housewife.
Young Clarence attended Catholic grade school and would have entered the seminary after eighth grade, but his father thought it better if he finished high school first.
After Larry graduated from Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, he entered the college seminary and proceeded through to post-graduate theology studies at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California.
He was ordained by Bishop Floyd L. Begin on May 2, 1975, in the St. Francis de Sales Cathedral in Oakland.
As a parish priest, he served as an associate pastor or pastor in 10 churches over 28 years. Many of the parishes were in low-income areas with high crime rates.
In 2003, Oakland Bishop Allen Vigneron appointed Father Silva as his vicar general, second in charge of the diocese after the bishop.
From early on, Bishop Silva had a strong interest in his island heritage, as an adult visiting the islands nearly every year.
In his research, he discovered that two of his relatives had been banished to Kalaupapa after having contracted Hansen’s disease — leprosy. Their fate was not discussed openly in the family. Bishop Silva’s great-grandfather, John Santos, was confined to the leprosy settlement in 1918.
Later Santos’ daughter, the bishop’s grand-aunt Millie Aruda (her married name), was also sent there. Both father and daughter are buried in Kalaupapa.
As providence would have it, Bishop Silva was the Hawaii bishop in place to witness the long-awaited canonizations of the islands’ two saintly heroes, Damien and Marianne of Molokai.
The bishop led groups of Hawaii pilgrims to Rome for the elevation to sainthood of Father Damien in 2009 and Mother Marianne in 2012.
Bishop Silva is an eager traveler, an attitude that befits the shepherd of a diocese of 65 parishes distributed over six islands. Hardly a week goes by when he is not visiting a neighbor island parish.
Being bishop also requires frequent visits to the mainland on episcopal business. He has also attended two “ad limina” visits to Rome for audiences with the pope and has taken part in papal visits to the United States.
The two canonizations prompted trips to the Vatican, Belgium and New York. Guadalupe and Lourdes were also destinations of Bishop Silva’s Marian devotional trips.
One of his favorite voluntary duties is leading pilgrimages to Kalaupapa, where Sts. Damien and Marianne served.
The globe-trotting bishop has also been to Vatican-sponsored World Youth Days in Brazil, Spain, Poland, Australia and Portugal.
Bishop Silva led the diocese through the trauma of COVID-19, the isolating pandemic that began in 2020 and severely challenged a faith whose very basis is encounter and community.
He was required to temporarily close churches, mandate social distancing, limit Mass attendance and revert to digital streaming of solemn liturgies.
One project he hopes to see finished over the next few years is the renovation and restoration of the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, Hawaii’s 180-year-old mother church. It was Bishop Silva’s advocacy that persuaded the Vatican to raise the cathedral to the status of a minor basilica.
The multi-million-dollar restoration work is about a third done.
Bishop Silva ordained 20 men to the priesthood, some of them for religious orders, and incardinated nearly 30 priests from other dioceses and religious orders into the diocese. He also ordained 30 permanent deacons.
Next year marks Bishop Silva’s 50th anniversary of priestly ordination and his 20th as a bishop.
