HCH photo | Darlene Dela Cruz
The cathedral with Kamiano Center on the right
The Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace will move its weekday Masses and confessions next door to the Kamiano Center from Sept. 23 to Dec. 1 while “phase one” of the interior renovation work takes place in the historic church.
Daily Masses are at 6:30 a.m. and noon. Confessions are offered every Wednesday 11-11:30 a.m.
Workers will be restoring one “bay,” or vertical section between pillars from ceiling to floor, of the cathedral. The church has 12 bays.
Construction will begin on Monday mornings and continue through Friday when the church will be cleaned and readied for regular weekend Masses.
According to cathedral rector, Father John Berger, writing in the Sept. 1 parish bulletin, the partial renovation “will yield two huge benefits: a foretaste of the dynamics and challenges of the entire building, and an actual finished swath to whet our appetites to complete the rest of the renewal project.”
The cathedral scheduled a “blessing and kick-off” of the work on Sept. 12.
The large space on the ground floor of the Kamiano Center, the building just makai of the cathedral on the Fort Street Mall, will be reconfigured into a daily “worshipping environment.”
HCH photo | Darlene Dela Cruz
A segment of the cathedral’s interior that is slated for renovation.
The center is normally used for meetings. During the cathedral construction, large meetings will be moved to other venues while small meetings will remain in the building’s smaller back rooms.
According to a memo from the office of the vicar general, Father Gary Secor, the cathedral should be back in full use by Dec. 2 when scaffolding will no longer be needed.
The finishing phase of the project will continue until Feb. 7, 2014.
The Kamiano Center is a remnant of the first girls school opened by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts more than a century ago. The building used to extend about two-thirds of the way down Fort Street toward Hotel Street. The small remaining segment had several previous commercial owners before the Diocese of Honolulu bought it a few years ago and renamed it. Kamiano is Hawaiian for Damien.
