Columba Murphy

Columba Murphy, SS.CC. (born James Murphy; 1806 – by 1848) was French Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a religious institute of the Roman Catholic Church. He helped found the Roman Catholic mission in the Gambier Islands and was one of the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in the Kingdom of Hawaii during the persecution by Kaahumanu, Kamehameha III and their American Congregationalist advisors.

Born James Murphy in 1806, he was a native Dundalk, Ireland. He was apprenticed to a carpenter, and later became a choir brother in Society of Picpus. Murphy was educated in an Irish college to become a priest, although he was never fully ordained before he left to engage in missionary work in the Pacific. With a British passport, he left for Bordeaux in 1833 and arrived in Valparaiso as part of the first group of Catholic missionaries sent to convert the Pacific Islands in 1834. In August 7, 1834, Father François Caret and Father Honoré Laval with Murphy serving as their assistant and catechists founded the Roman Catholic mission in the Gambier Islands, the first in the Pacific Islands, after landing on the island of Akamaru.

In 1835, Murphy was sent periodically to Hawaii by Father Alexis Bachelot, SS.CC., the Apostolic Prefect of Hawaii, who was living in exile in Lower California, to evaluate the situation which the Roman Catholic Church had found itself in the Hawaiian Islands. As a seminarian, still technically a layman, he was allowed to enter the kingdom, from which the priests of his Order were barred. It was during these visits that he came to determine that the time was right for the priests to return and establish their presence in the mission, which had been maintained by the lay brothers who had been allowed to remain.

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