Sister Julia Marie Acain, CSJ
Sister Julia Marie Acain, a Maui girl who, with her sister Catherine, joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet 60 years ago and enjoyed a long fruitful career in education, died on April 20 in Makawao, Maui. She was 79.
Sister Julia Marie was a teacher in California, on Oahu and Maui, and was a missionary on Lanai.
Julie, as Sister Julia Marie was affectionately known, was the fourth of 12 children — six boys and six girls — of Mamerto and Julia Acain. Her Philippines-born father had come to Maui to work on the plantations. Her mother was a Big Island native.
The Acains’ first home was in the small Maui village of Hamakuapoko. Julie and her siblings were baptized in the tiny, and long-closed, St. Ann Church, a mission of Holy Rosary Church in Paia.
In the early 1950s, the family moved to upper Paia to a house located just below Holy Rosary Church where they became active parishioners. The large family usually attended Sunday’s 9 a.m. “high Mass,” participating as altar servers, choir members and ushers. The name “Acain” became synonymous with “loving service to God and neighbor … without distinction.”
In September of 1953, Julie and her younger sister Catherine left their close-knit family to begin their religious formation as Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in Los Angeles. They entered the novitiate with the reception of their religious habit on March 19, 1954.
In reflecting on that decision, Sister Julie Marie said, “When God called me to become a sister, there was no doubt in my mind that he would give me the grace I needed to respond wholeheartedly to him. I really missed my family, but I met so many other families of the sisters who were in the novitiate with me and wherever I was in mission in California and Hawaii that they became my ohana, too!”
After her profession of vows on March 19, 1956, Sister Julia Marie taught in a number of schools in the greater Los Angeles area. In 1967, she was assigned to St. Theresa School in Honolulu. She returned to her beloved Maui in 1971 to teach at Christ the King School in Kahului.
A serious illness in 1974 required her to return to California for treatment. She returned to Hawaii in good health in 1975 and resumed teaching at St. Theresa School. She went back to Christ the King School in 1981 where she taught until 1988.
In the summer of 1988, in a historical move for their congregation, Hawaii’s Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet sent three sisters — Sister Julie Marie, Sister Marcelina Felipe and Sister Nadine Schafer — to establish a mission at Sacred Hearts Parish on Lanai.
The mission’s purpose was to empower the parishioners to live their baptismal promises as lay leaders with the pastor, meeting the challenges of the post-Vatican II church. After having planted the seeds of renewal and collaboration on the Pineapple Isle, the sisters left in 1990.
Sister Julie Marie returned to Christ the King School to work as a librarian and teacher aide until her retirement in 2007. She also ministered as a tutor and friend of the families living at Ka Hale a Ke Ola Homeless Resource Center in Wailuku from 1992 until 2002.
All who knew Sister Julia Marie loved her. She was the kind of person who could lift drooping spirits with her wide smile and gentle manner. She especially loved being with children — “God’s special ones,” she called them.
Sister Julia Marie’s funeral was May 3 at Christ the King Church, Kahului. She was buried in St. Joseph Church Cemetery in Makawao, Maui.
A memorial Mass on Oahu is being planned for a later date.
