Indiginization as a Missionary Goal in the Caroline-Marshall Islands

Fr. Francis X. Hezel, SJ 1978

Christian missions have long been a controversial force in the colonial history of Oceania. To some observers, the missionary is the very personification of that spirit of cultural imperialism which has succeeded in wreaking its mindless changes on unsuspecting naive peoples and in making of their islands cultural wastelands. The very word "missionary" often conjures up the image of a religious frontiersman, usually ill-prepared to appreciate the beauty and logic of the culture within which he works, who pursues single-mindedly his goal of "converting the heathen." With cross upraised over the pagan land, he busies himself in baptizing babies, uprooting "degrading superstitions," and preaching a new and better way of life to a people who are in his eyes at best "children," at worst "savages." However noble his intentions, the Christian missionary is an unwitting perpetrator of cultural genocide among the very people he professes to help.

This stereotype of the missionary as imperialist is not without a measure of truth in it. And yet it is surely not the whole truth, for, ever since the inception of foreign evangelization in Micronesia one of the chief goals has been the indigenization of the church in those islands. However Indigenization may have been spelt out at different times and by different groups - and, as we shall see, it has been subject to frequent redefinition - its basic meaning has always been the establishment of what might be called a native church. Needless to say, the term "native church" has been variously interpreted. In the early Protestant era, a "native church" was a church whose resources, both personnel and money, were generated from within the island communities themselves so that outside assistance was no long necessary. Such a church was autonomous in that it did not have to rely on foreign churches for support. In recent years, however, a "native church" has come to mean much more than the ability of a local congregation to supply enough pastors and material for the continuation of the ecclesial structure. Within the last decade, a "native church " has been understood to mean a church whose religious content as well as its formal structures are rooted in the local community. Indigenization, in this latter sense, is the process of fashioning a church in which the cultural traditions of the people are the clash from which religious symbols, ritual, and preaching are fashioned. A "native church," then, is one in which Christianity can be thought and lived in terms of the cultural milieu of the islanders themselves, not of the Bostonians or Basques, who brought them the faith.

In this paper we shall attempt to trace the evolution of the meaning of Indigenization, as this was operative as a missionary goal in Micronesia since the middle of the 19th century. We will also try to point out some of the forces that were in direct conflict with the goal of Indigenization at different stages in missionary activity in Micronesia. The most notable of these, of course, was the colonialist attitudes that the missionary was unable to shuck even as he worked to build up what he saw as a native church. Finally, we will attempt to show how, in the last five years, the missionary charge to establish an indigenized church is seen as part of an even broader task - nothing less than the Indigenization of society itself. This recent movement, which has been particularly associated with the Catholic Church in the Caroline-Marshall Islands, has resulted in a major volte face on the part of the Catholic Church. Those who were formerly regarded as among the vanguard of the colonizers now become the champions of the indigenous rather than foreign institutions. It is ironic that the same institution that for years had advocated conversion to a foreign way of life as well as to a foreign God should lately have acquired the reputation of singing the praises of the traditional ways and issuing warnings against the dangers of rapid modernization. But such is the interesting reversal that is evident in the Catholic Church of the Caroline-Marshall Islands. It only illustrates the evolution that has taken place in the definition of foreign missionaries of their goals within the last hundred years.

At the very outset of its missionary activity in Micronesia, the American Board of Commissioners for the Foreign Missions (ABCFM) professed as its goal the establishment of native churches there, "self-financing, self-governing, and self-propagating." Its work in Micronesian began in 1852 with the arrival of three American and two Hawaiian couple who took up work on the islands of Ponape and Kusaie. In accordance with the established policy of the day, there was no rush to make converts; it was six years after their coming that the first natives were received into the church of Kusaie, and eight years before the first three Ponapeans were admitted. A decade after the start of evangelization there were no more than 27 Kusaieans and 36 Ponapeans who had become full members of the church. Once church membership began to increase, however, it was not long before a few were selected to assume positions of leadership in the nascent church. By 1869, the first native deacon (the son of "Good King George" of Kusaie) was ordained, and two years later another was elevated to the ministry. By the early 1870s the training school on Ponape was already preparing native teachers, deacons and pastors, several of whom would be the first to bring Christianity to Truk and the Mortlocks within the next few years. In the Marshalls, which received their first foreign missionary in 1857, progress towards the establishment of a native church was just as swift. Already in 1880, when the training school for the Marshalls was relocated in Kusaie and the last of the American missionaries removed from Ebon, the entire Marshalls mission was left to the care of a small band of Hawaiian teachers together with a few Marshallese who had been trained in the local mission school.

The dispatch with which the first American Congregationalists sought to carry out their commission - i.e., to "set in order native churches, raise up a native ministry for them, ordain ministers in the important places, and train the Christian community, thus organized, to the power and habit of self-government and self-support” - did not go unquestioned1. Mission letters during the 1980s complain of a relapse into heathenism by recent converts in the Mortlocks who resumed the use of turmeric and tobacco. Blame was usually laid upon the native teachers in these islands, and some were afterwards removed. A foreign missionary, writing in the Annual Report of ABCFM: 1890, laments the "inadequate supervision" over the work of native teachers in the Mortlocks that has resulted in "the lowered character of preachers and teachers, the feeble life of the churches, the want of discipline, and of (poor) numbers in the schools." There were apparently others, missionaries and non-missionaries alike, who shared his belief that the Protestant churches were being turned over to native ministers and teachers too quickly. Rev. Robert Logan, the first American missionary in Truk, wrote just a few months before his death in 1887 of his own misgivings in this respect. "What folly to expect that these races can take on pure morals and Christian civilization in a few years! Souls can be saved, morals and manners improved, the seeds of all progress planted and nourished, but the century plant grows quickly in comparison with true civilization."2 And the great German ethnologist August Krämer, who visited the Marshalls shortly after the turn of the century, expressed surprise that the spiritual care of a "community of 13,500 natives" could be responsibly entrusted to "one or two dozen uneducated men."3

The intention of the American Board was clearly to set up native churches throughout the Micronesian mission and then to withdraw outside support at the earliest opportunity. From the very beginning of its missionary activity in Micronesia, it discouraged excessive dependence of local churches on funding from abroad. Each native congregation was required to contribute food and labor for the support of its church.4 Chiefs in Truk who requested native teachers for their islands during the boon years of the early 1880s had to promise to build a suitable home for the teacher and his family, construct a church, and provide for the continual upkeep of both. Dr. Gulick, one of the first American missionaries on Ponape, wrote in 1854 that he was frequently compelled to refuse the request of chiefs on that island for small gifts lest he subvert the clearly-stated goal of a self-supporting church. This policy, admirable though it may have been, was not without its difficulties. The insistence of Congregationalist missionaries that natives buy, rather than receive gratis, clothes obtained through the mission led to the accusation in later years of avarice and mercantilism on the part of its representatives. This unfounded charge was given all the more credence because of the rigorous insistence of pastors that natives be modestly attired if they wished to attend church services. The first Catholic missionaries, by way of contrast, had no such scruples about the long-range effects that their practice of distributing gifts might have. When they gave out trinkets to the people of Yap and Ponape in the early years of their work in the Carolines, they hoped that their liberality would win the affection of the natives and prepare the way for their conversion. The hard line of the early Congregationalist missionaries eventually did lead to the establishment of self-supporting churches, but according to one witness it was also responsible for the defection of a good many members for pecuniary reasons and the decision of others against joining the Protestant church in the first place. One visitor to Ponape at the turn of the century recorded what had become a cliché by this time: "I shall not become a Protestant for I am poor. I shall become a Catholic, for the Fathers do not ask me to pay for anything."5

Despite the difficulties inherent in its policies, the American Board succeeded in accomplishing the task that it had set for itself. By the turn of the century there were 20 ordained native pastors, and 80 more native preachers and teachers serving the church membership of over 6,600 in Micronesia.6 Contributions from local sources totaled about $7,000 a year. The Protestant Church was well on its way to becoming fully autonomous.

Catholic missionary efforts in the Caroline and Marshall Islands, which were initiated in 1886 on Yap and a year later on Ponape, did not exhibit the same urgency for the establishment of a native church that marked the Protestant activity during the last century. Although the number of baptized Catholics in 1905 - only 20 years after the founding of the mission - was recorded as 10,000, there were no native pastors, no catechists, and no collections. The financing and leadership of the Catholic Church in the Carolines remained securely in the hands of the Capuchin missionaries who were entrusted with this field. This can be explained in good part by the theology of missions that prevailed in Catholic circles of that day. The task of the missionary was to save through his direct apostolic intervention as many souls as possible in the pagan land in which he labored. The charge of the Catholic missionary, as it was formulated in the encyclical of Benedict XV, was "to open the way of heaven to those hurrying to destruction." The personal salvation of pagans was no less an object of concern for the Protestant pastor, of course, but the external constraints imposed on him by his mission board has the effect of recalling him to the more distant goal of Indigenization. It was not until the 1920s, under the foal of establishing a native church in a mission land - like that which guided Protestant missionary work during the 19th century - won any wide acceptance at all among Catholics. Thereafter, “implanting the Church” came to be canonized in ecclesiastical pronouncements as the primary aim of missionary activity.

Even if early Catholic missionaries to Micronesia had espoused the goal of creating a truly native church, the structures within which they were forced to operate would have put its attainment out of their reach. Although Catholic missionaries seem to have admitted new members with relative ease when compared to Protestant missionaries, there was an extraordinarily long process of acculturation required before a baptized Catholic could assume a position of leadership in the Church. There were not the intermediate ecclesial offices, such as preacher and teacher, in the Catholic Church to provide a means of screening and selecting those who would become pastors. One was forced to leap from the pew to the pulpit, as it were, in one long, arduous bound that demanded commitment to the priesthood from the beginning rather than a series of more modest steps forward. Ordination of Micronesians to the priesthood was the only means of achieving native church leadership at that time, and the obstacles to ordination were formidable. It meant long years of study abroad, the mastery of Latin, and a life of celibacy among a people for whom this was all but unthinkable. The training program for native Protestant leaders, conducted as it was in a boarding school set-up, was deliberately intended to shield students from undesirable cultural influences - “the contaminating influence of their homes and the interference of their chiefs," as one missionary put it8. But the training only lasted two or three years, and the school was located in an island environment. Seminary training for the Catholic priesthood demanded a complete severance of the candidate from his community and the psychological capacity to live as a stranger in his own land upon his return from the seminary.

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