Solomons Catholics

'Sin! What’S Sin?'Ask

The Solomon Islands Catholics lack a sense of sin they are not devout except when misfortune befalls them. At least, that’s how the white Marist missionaries see it. And Hugh Laracy, author of Marists and Melanesians, believes that the in stitutional Church is still alien: “the religious sanctions of the old social order have been broken down and Christian moral values have not com pensated for them’’.

He does, however, see no reason to assume that “the heirs of Melanesian animists are any less capable of professing Christianity than the descendants of Celtic or Teutonic polytheists”. The appointment of Gregory Sinkai as bishop leaves no doubt what the Vatican thinks.

The Marists first reached the Solomons in 1845. Within a fortnight Bishop Epalle was axed to death on San Cristobal, but the work was con tinued in spite of local hostility and an even greater foe, malaria. The first parties sent to what is now Papua New Guinea, to Murua Island in 1847 and Umboi Island a year later, were beaten by the same adversaries. It was not until the 1890 s that the Marists got a foothold in German New Guinea.

As the years went by, mission stations were established on several islands in the Solomons and on Bougainville and Buka. There was a lot of bickering among the Marists and one priest, Rinaldo Joseph Pavese, was recalled, by the Pope. (I have often wondered whether the eccentricity of Europeans in the tropics is in direct relationship to their proximity to the equator.) But most of the priests and the nuns associated with them toiled well and deserved and earned the respect and affection of the islanders.

There was bitter sectarian competi tion with Methodists, South Sea Evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists and Anglicans. In 1929, for instance, Methodists and Catholics destroyed each other’s chapels at Osokoli and Huhuka; a judicial commission laid most of the blame on the Marists and placed restrictions on ‘foreign’

Melanesian and Polynesian mis sionaries. There was, however, one gain from the competition: the various missions stepped up their medical and educational work

because of the propaganda value at taching to it.

Thomas Wade, the Marists’ first English-speaking priest and later their first bishop, defused the situation, and the years since the Pacific War have seen growing ecumenism. By 1942, the Marists had 120 missionaries at 34 posts throughout the Solomons; over 30,000 islanders were baptised Catholics while about 50,000 adhered to one or other of the Protestant mis sions. The Catholics are now in the majority.

The Marists made few con tributions to the scientific knowledge of the Solomons but, on the credit side, they interfered less with the islanders’ tradition than did the Protestants.

The author rightly points out that what he perceives to be ideological ap titude for conversion has been ac tivated by social factors: the reduction of the islanders’ traditional control over the world through the introduc tion of new problems of disease, economic dependence and fear of European wrath.

The white man had shown himself to be allpowerful and with seemingly unlimited material wealth. If, as James McAuley has suggested, cargo cultism is mainly a technique to ac quire the white man’s power and wealth — and there have been many cults in the Solomons, from 1914, possibly even earlier, through the 1930s and in the postwar period — then the people’s readiness to become converts is easier to understand.

Like most of the Protestant mis sions, the Marists were too slow in in digenising their Church; only in recent years have they given due cognisance to the capacities and wishes of the local people.

After reading this straight-forward, honest and scholarly account of the endeavours of one particular ‘brand’ of European missionary, one can but hope that the new churches of the Pacific are not compounding the errors of the past, that they will put love and tolerance before dogma and pride.

Dr Laracy has looked at the Marists through European eyes. It remains for a Melanesian to look at

them.

Harry Jackman

(Marists And Melanesians. By Hugh Laracy.

Published by ANU Press, Canberra, ACT, Australia $12.95.)