The Evening Star SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1938. ROMAN CATHOLIC CENTENARY.

Evening Star, Issue 22893, 26 February 1938, Page 14

The Evening Star SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1938. ROMAN CATHOLIC CENTENARY.

To-day and for the next eight days the Roman Catholic Church in New Zealand will be celebrating the centenary of - its work in this country. It is an event in which every member of that church has good cause to feel pride. The early days of its work in a rude-and undeveloped country were not less marked by devotion and heroism than those of other churches, nor has devotion to it ever been wanting since. It is appropriate that the chief celebrations should be held at Auckland, because it was at Hokianga, in Auckland province, that Bishop Pompalliei', on January 10, 1838, first landed, with one Marisfc priest and one Marist brother. The admirable official souvenir of the celebrations has reason to say “ not a little misrepresentation and much misunderstanding has gathered round the name of Jean Baptiste Francois Pompallier.”. That was inevitable in the conditions of the times. The Bishop had hoped for a field where he would not come in conflict with other churches. But the work of Anglican and Methodist missions had spread from the Bay of Islands to Hokianga. The Anglicans had been iti the country for twentythree years and the Methodists for fifteen. Marsden himself had introduced the Methodists, but that was an example of religious tolerance -which, for those days, was almost unique. Pompallier’s church could not acknowledge others, and they were bound to consider him as an interloper upsetting their work. It was natural also that, like the preposterous Baron de Thierry, he should be suspected of being a French agent, though the French Government, as distinct from companies, had no more desire, of burdening itself with New Zealand worries than, at that stage, had the British. He Was suspected of using his influence against the Treaty of Waifaugi. As the late Mr Lindsay Buick lias made clear, there is no sure evidence to support the charge, and what may well be conclusive evidence against it, though that was not brought forward till a later period. We can accept the bishop’s statements, made to another sterling Frenchman, Commodore Lavaud, that his mission, as he regarded it, was purely a spiritual one, and that his being an ecclesiastic put him outside of all politics. Pompallier and his workers, who were soon increased in numbers, felt too much elation possibly at the rapidity with which they made converts among the Maoris. There was an advantage of prestige in being the only bishop. [Selwyn did not arrive till 1842.] The forms and vestments of the newcomers made their own appeal to the Maori mind. The ground had been so far prepared that by 1838 the earlier missions, which bad wrought at (list with almost no sign of results, were rejoicing at the wide extent of their harvest. TliJ workers that Marsden watched over at a distance, except for visits, were mostly laymen. The French priests, being unmarried, had fewer temporal needs to provide for, and were exempt from temptations to obtain lands for themselves to which some, but not all, of their forerunners succumbed. Protestants gibed at the ease with which their rivals accepted Native converts. With the Maori wars converts of all the churches relapsed, and the work of all of them, in that field, had to begin anew.

' Work whs needed for the church’s own people, as well as Maoris, and that also could have its heroic side. Even Protestants can admire the devout spirit of Mary Poyntun, who, settled at Hokianga with her husband Thomas from as early as 1828, took her firstborn child to Sydney, a voyage of a thousand miles, to be baptised. In their house the first Mass was celebrated by Bishop Pompallier. Poynton had gone repeatedly to Australia to plead for a priest for New Zealand. Protestants can accept his co-religionists’ judgment of the first bishop as “ a man of saintly qualities ... a truly apostolic man, whoso whole life was instinct with the love of God and his fellows.” He was 37 when he came to New Zealand, and his death, in his seventy-first year, was hastened by privations which he suffered during the siege of Paris. His companions and other early labourers were worthy of him. “ Our poor fathers have to go like savages and bog a few piece* of biscuit from strange ships,” wrote one of them in the early Maori days. The work among scattered Irish

Catholics could be as exacting. Eileen Duggan has written of Father Petitjean, lost for ‘2O hours in an Otago snowstorm, and kept alive by a lamb which he pressed to his body for warmth. A St. Kilda 'street is well named after Father Moreau, who, to quote the ‘ New Zealand Tablet,’ “ founded the church in Otago, and ever showed such charity and meekness among the gold, miners of the south that. Presbyterians though they ivere, they presented him with a purse of sovereigns on his departure from them and saluted him as an ornament to our common humanity.” The recriminations and suspicions, far more generally shown by all churches in the old days than such acts of magnanimity, can fairly be forgotten by them in these times. All alike have their hardest war to wage against materialism, which is the common foe, and when any one of them makes its record good in that conflict the rest can only say “ well done,” content for it to mark its triumph in its own way, and heedful of what they can learn from it.