View from the pew
Hopefully, Hawaii Catholics will get stimulated to spend some interest and energy on celebrating next year when we reach a milestone of history, the 200th anniversary of Catholic presence in Hawaii.
The first missionary priests from a French religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, arrived in 1827. By that time, Protestant Christian missionaries from New England who started arriving en masse in 1820 had a strong foothold and backing of Hawaiian alii.
A reader or two scolded me for the August View from the Pew because I focused on the negative side of that history. But it’s a fact that the first Catholics were subjected to persecution and forced labor when the Catholic clergy were banished for a “dark decade” by the Hawaiian monarch at the behest of the Protestant church leaders.
However, that is so much in the rearview mirror. From the 21st-century perspective of interfaith acceptance and alliances, I doubt that it’s ever mentioned in classrooms or sermons.
Along with Catholic clergy worldwide, the Sacred Hearts order has dwindled in numbers of priests, brothers and sisters and now staff just a few parishes in Hawaii. And almost all of their newly ordained members are from other countries. In the whole Honolulu diocese, many of our clergy were not born in America.
My parish is in the hands of an Indonesian pastor and a Vietnamese parochial vicar, well-educated men whose accents make them nearly unintelligible to much of the congregation. “Do you know what Father said?” is the typical subject of parishioners’ conversation after Sunday Mass.
I work hard at understanding, and I reminisce about the Belgian and French clergy decades ago. Same problem trying to “get” what Father Matthew or Father Louis was saying. But we kept the faith, thanks be to God.
I have a theory that the climate of religious tolerance we enjoy can be credited to immigrants and Buddhists as much as to that intangible spiritual gift we call aloha spirit.
As I’ve come to know descendants of immigrants from Asia who became part of the energy, heart and soul of Hawaii over the past 150 years, I often feel a twinge of envy.
From 1852 through the early 1900s, waves of contract workers were brought here to work on the sugar and pineapple plantations.
The fact that each wave of people came from the same country and often the same community — starting with the Chinese in 1852, through Japanese, Koreans to Filipinos in 1906 — bonded these folks. Rather than go their separate ways, they stuck together. Back in the day, you’d hear about a “hui,” a group of Chinese people would pool their finances to help each other start a business. The island custom of tucking money in a condolence card started as a support system to help a family finance a funeral. Nowadays, we join in things like Chinatown events, the Okinawan Festival, Filipino cultural center activities and Japanese folk dances at Buddhist obon gatherings.
I miss the Portuguese Holy Ghost celebrations, which involved a parade of sometimes puzzling Catholic imagery and great food. Portuguese contract workers arrived in the 1870s, the only European migrants brought to plantations. That led to the island idiosyncrasy of separating that ethnic group from the inclusive and often derogatory Hawaiian identification of people of European descent as “haole.”
Despite all that wandering pondering, I’ll get back to the dark side where I started.
Here we are in a year of celebrating another historical milestone, the creation of the “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all” 250 years ago. It’s somewhat questionable timing. But it suited the political motives of its advocate not to wait for the actual tri-centennial in 2076. Fireworks and concerts and road races, oh my!
We love to think that our country’s forefathers were unified about the freedom of speech and freedom of religion that they wrote into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. An article in the July-August edition of America, a Jesuit Catholic magazine provides a disturbing and eye-opening look at the anti-Catholic bias that ran deep for early centuries in our country.
The story, “Romanism and Rebellion” by the senior editor James T. Keane, can be found online. He used references to a series on the subject by historian Father Anthony Andreassi that can be found on OSV (Our Sunday Visitor) online.
They tell of the anti-Catholic bias which began in the 1500s when England’s King Henry VIII rejected the pope and created the Anglican church, followed by the Protestant Revolution launched by Martin Luther.
Centuries of religious persecution directed at Irish Catholics were part of the British heritage that America’s early settlers, starting with the Puritans in 1620, brought to the New World. Added to that was the earliest political rivalry with France, which was colonizing Canada, and, in the New World, Louisiana.
Charles Carroll, a prominent Maryland landowner, was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The Maryland colony passed a Toleration Act of 1649. But as Keane wrote in his article, Father Andreassi pointed out that the English Civil War in 1689 “hardened hearts against Catholics in British territories and by the 18th Century most Catholics were secluded from the colony’s public life and restricted to worshipping in private.”
The America editor used snarky remarks by John Adams who described a 1774 visit to St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia with George Washington: “The afternoon entertainment was the most awful and affecting. The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of it they understood. The mass included everything that can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.”
Keane wrote, “We might recognize that with the talk about American history being driven by the quest for religious freedom, we are at best misremembering a nuanced past, and at worst, telling a lie.”
Bishop John Carroll of Maryland, a cousin of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, became the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States. He wrote that after the Revolutionary War, the new nation had “banished intolerance from their systems of government in part by giving everyone, regardless of creed, an equal right of participation in civil life. Freedom and independence, acquired by the united efforts and cemented by the mingled blood of Protestant and Catholic fellow citizens, should be equally enjoyed by all.”
In a few weeks, we citizens of 21st-century America can celebrate what those first patriots accomplished. Not just by praying for our country, but by filling in a ballot to select our leaders.