The Pope in Melanesia

When Pope John Paul II steps off his Alitalia jet at Port Mores by’s airport in the late afternoon of May 7, he will not be on completely strange soil.

The indefatigable flying Pon tiff in 1973, when he was a cardinal, visited Polish mis sionaries of the Society of the Divine Word in New Guinea.

According to bishops of the Catholic Episcopal Conference of the Pacific (CEPAC) who visited the Pope in Rome in February, this quick 1984 trip could easily be just a curtain raiser.

The CEPAC bishops have invited him, after he visits Can ada in 1985,t0 fly back to Rome across the Pacific and Asia and make a more ex tended visit to several countries and local Catholic churches in the Polynesian and Micronesian areas not included in his 1984 journey.

He seemed interested and willing to come. He has an instant fellow-feeling for small nations struggling to shake off cultural domination by outside powers. The first non-Italian Pope for centuries is, after all, very much a Pole.

Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands were logical first destinations during this year’s visit. The Roman Catho lic Church has become a major social force in the life of the Pacific’s most populous coun try.

Prime Minister Michael So mare, a Roman Catholic from the Sepik, is set down to make the welcome speech at Jackson Airport. Father John Momis, for long a stormy petrel and unpre dictable force in PNG politics, along with Father Leo Hannett, might collect at least private pontifical reprimands. Both have been politically involved and aligned, in spite of current directions from Rome to priests all over the world.

Bernard Narakobi, the able lawyer who did so much to frame the Papua New Guinea constitution, is a committed, if rather off-beat, Catholic. His style of life these days differs noticeably from the atmosphere of marble halls, tiaras and biret

tas in the Vatican.

The Holy Father, always well-briefed in advance, will be no stranger to the internal positioning among the many Catholic missionary orders and congregations at work in the various dioceses of Papua New Guinea.

Beneath an over-arching uni ty, determined by loyalty to the hierarchy, the Sacred Heart missionaries, the Divine Word missionaries, the Passionists, Mariannhillers, Montfort mis sionaries, Franciscans and Capuchins are more culturally diversified in their origins and emphases than the numerous Protestant denominations.

Papua New Guinea’s nuns, whether local or from abroad, whether in teaching or social work, are almost equally dissimilar. Some have become restless in their critique of the rich, including the custodians of the wealth of the Church.

One question asked im mediately about this multi-ling ual Pope is whether he would have enough pidgin to open and close his speeches in a way that would endear him to all the wantok.

He will likely allude to one or more saintly Catholic pioneers on New Guinea terrain.

Perhaps there will be a papal accolade of some sort for Alain de Boismenu, trail-blazer of the Papuan mountains, who died in apostolic poverty in a simple hut among his people. Another might go to the controversial and brilliant mystic Marie- Therese Noblet, who bled phy sically with the wounds of Christ and founded a local order of women to work among the very poor.

He would probably mention a martyr he personally beatified last February together with 100 others from many lands. Bles sed John Mazzucconi, of the Milan Fathers, a 29 year old missionary, was slaughtered on Murua Island (Woodlark) in 1855 after earlier surviving a gruesome chapter of accidents in the Solomon Islands. Maz zucconi may now be on the road to canonisation, with the title Saint.

The program has room for such allusions. A two-hour open air mass at Port Moresby’s outdoor stadium soon after arri val is set to be followed by talks with the bishops of the Papua New Guinea-Solomons Con ference and an address to cler gy and laity in the Port Moresby Cathedral.

True to form, the schedule approved is exhausting, calling for an early morning flight on Day Two to Mount Hagen, where another open air mass was due to be concelebrated with the bishops of the High lands.

This quick sortie was predict able. The missionaries of the Divine Word (SVD) there, with many of their pioneers and predecessors, hail from the Pope’s own home Central Europe region. They have been inventive and influential the largest single Catholic force at work along the New Guinea littoral and in the Highlands.

The future of the priesthood is one of the questions always up for scrutiny when bishops from all parts of the Pacific are together.

The expatriate Catholic mis sionary workforce is now statis tically on the wane. The Roman Catholic Church nevertheless frets over being still far more expatriate in its local leadership than the Protestants.

In the parishes the problem is likely to persist. Religious voca tions have declined for both men and women in Europe and America. Pacific Islands govern ments have tightened up on work permits for expatriates.

How can an adequate priest hood, particularly, be properly trained in the consequent race against the clock?

The ideas of ascetic life, individual and solitary, spiritual ity and life-long celibacy, are strange to peoples accustomed for centuries to the sexual ex uberance and reinforcing social warmth of extended families.

Already some married men in the Pacific are in deacon’s orders. More are being trained; but as the rules stand at Rome they can never progress to

becoming full priests of the Church.

If, as is now being strongly urged by many Catholics in Africa, the celibacy rule is varied and married priests are permitted, what happens?

Many who have been celi bate priests for years will want to take wives. The shape of the Church would wobble. Mean while, a steady, though not accurately quantified, leakage from the ranks of seminarians and clergy continues. Some are permitted to be ’’secularised” and then to marry. For the bishops, the problems are con siderable.

John Paul II is expected not to budge on the celibacy issue in 1984 ... or in 1985.

Nor is he likely to shift his stand on birth control.

On other fronts the Pope is expected to renew his repeated warnings with more confidence that the faithful and the general public in the islands would be glad to hear from him.

He fully endorses the process now described by the mystify ing in-house tgerm ’’incultura tion,” which means the growth of local churches expressing themselves at all levels in local Pacific languages, customs, worship and ways of life.

If he visits Eastern and Cen tral Oceania next year he will absorb for himself a message already given to him in advance by the bishops of those areas.

They have told him that the Church of the Poor, which has become so radicalised along militant Marxist-leaning lines in the Philippines and in Central and South America, has diffe rent features on small islands separated by enormous wastes of sea.

The poor, in the frequently subsistence-affluent Pacific Is lands, have to be understood as the marginalised, the neglected, the last to get aid from abroad, the loneliest those who are either exploited or forgotten by

the big geopolitical powers with which the Pope mostly has to contend, He senses this. He might well speak out against atomic testing in the region, the domination of the orignal owners of the land by powerful colonising nations, the spoiling of the environment by waste-dumping and indust rial exploitation - and deface ment of finely-wrought cultures by floods of money and mass produced junk.

These themes could be keynoted if John Paul comes again to Oceania in 1985.

Another aspect of his agenda will also have to be the boom ing ecumenical movement. The local Roman Catholic churches in the Oceania region are in full and active membership, through their bishops’ confer ence, in the Pacific Conference of Churches. Some of the most prominent leaders among Pro testants, Anglicans and Roman Catholics are firm friends.

An advance indication of papal attitudes towards Central Oceania and the Eastern Pacific was given this year. The move came in re-allocation of the ecclesiastical structure in the United States Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. The Pope detached the Church in Guam from the United States Conference of Bishops. He elevated Guam’s bishop to archbishop, then related his province to the Episcopal Conference of the Pacific Islands (CEPAC), bringing it into the Pacific Conference of Churches. This means Guam’s jurisdiction will now extend to the Caroline and Marshall Islands of Micronesia, which have been placed under the new archbishop. These island groups have been under heavy political and social pressures from the United States. They have, until now, been under the Archbishop of Suva and are therefore already able to be

vocal through CEPAC.

Christians generally in the Marshalls and Carolines are more restive under United States influence than their neighbors in the Northern Marianas. The bishops in the United States might well be hearing new rumblings, via Guam and direct from Rome, about islanders made radio active and homeless by testing, the progressive militarisation of the Trust Territory, and the extensive erosion of pre-Amer ican cultural heritages in the islands, When John Paul flies to spend the third day of his 1984 visit in Honiara, in the Solomon Islands, which is part of his Church’s Melanesian province along with Papua New Guinea, he will move closer to the rest of Oceania. Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, in Polynesia and Micronesia, are now wait ing to hear about his plans for

1985.

John Garrett.