Maine, Massachusetts, and the Marists: American Catholic Missionaries in the South Pacific

MAINE, MASSACHUSETTS, AND THE MARISTS: AMERICAN CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC BY Hugh Laracy* There may be no "Grand Design" behind the unfolding and configuring of human affairs. Even so, the Pauline vision of "all things working together unto one" (Eph. 1:10; Rom. 8:28) remains relentlessly attractive , especially in retrospect. In order to understand the who? how? what? where? when? and why? of particular, local, and relatively obscure phenomena one may be driven to explore a heterogeneous set of circuitous linkages and to order them within a large and logically coherent context that seems to have been discovered rather than constructed . That is, one in which many disparate forces appear to have been harnessed in a singularly fortuitous way to produce and shape results that might accord with the intentions of planners and which a sympathetic providence might have engineered, but which could scarcely have been predicted. In this arrangement, hitherto undiscerned implications of diverse events may be discovered and occurrences widely separated by time and distance may be related as cause and effect. The indirectness of the connections need not dilute their potency . Their very unobtrusiveness may enhance the allure of enquiry by offering prospects of discovery Such ruminations on the logistics of historical causality and on the seductions of hindsight arise in the present instance from a set of questions relating to Catholic missionary activity in the southwest Pacific: why is it that within the major denominations, with the notable excep- *Dr. Laracy is an associate professor of history in the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Research for this paper was carried out while he was honored to hold a FuIbright Senior Fellowship in the United States ofAmerica in 1994. He is also grateful for the assistance of Fathers (S.M.) Ray Arsenault, VaI Becker, Paul Chaisson, Gaston Lessard, and Mick O'Connor, and for that of Sisters (S.M.S.M.) Gloria Fournier and Aquin Maloney. A preliminary version of the paper was presented at the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Conference in Christchurch in February, 1996. 566 BY HUGH LARACY567 tion of the Lutheran mission to New Guinea, American missionaries have been numerous only among the Catholics?1 Why did many of these Americans have French surnames? Why did so many of them come from Maine or from Lawrence and other towns in northern Massachusetts ? Why were they so numerous in the three decades following World War II? The answers to these and related questions require that the ramified causal mechanisms be placed within a setting that embraces the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which extends well beyond America. Mercifully, it is one that also yields easily to the gravitational pull of narrative. The most pertinent chronological starting point is 1836, with the official emergence in Lyon, France, of the Société de Marie. This was a company of priests and brothers usually known as the Pères Maristes or Marist Fathers. Helping to procure the Vatican's recognition of the Marists as a self-governing religious congregation was an undertaking by their founder that in addition to their other apostolic works they would also evangelize the islands of the western Pacific. By 1898, however , when they set up a separate province of Oceania, their responsibilities in that huge area had been confined to the Solomons, New Hebrides (since 1979 Vanuatu), New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, with another distinct province of New Zealand. Meanwhile, in 1861 the order had also spread from France, via England, to Ireland in order to recruit English-speaking priests for Irish migrants in New Zealand, and in 1863 to the United States, to minister to settlers of mainly French ancestry in Louisiana.2 The Marists' entry into the United States accorded with what was to be one of the defining features of American Catholicism for the next half-century. During that time the United States, far from having a Catholic missionary outreach, was itself a major absorber of missionary efforts. It was a place in which apostles from the Old World, mostly French, strove to build the structure of the Church around the immi1H . Wagner and H. Reiser, The Lutheran Church in Papua...