Dogatuki, an area of nine villages in the far north-west of Vanua Levu, the second largest island of the Fiji group, now has a solution to its problem.
The Problem
"Our people are dispirited. 30 years ago the former Archbishop accepted our request to establish a parish here but this has not happened. No priest has been appointed here. We have been passed around among three different parishes since then and only occasionally has a priest come to say Mass. Through holding fundraising bazaars we had collected $86,000 about 20 years ago.
This was put in an Archdiocesan account but our requests for information about it have not been answered. We planted a lot of yaqona, a good cash crop, to use for building a parish church and presbytery here but, over the years, priests came and uprooted some of it for their own purposes.” This was the sad account told to me by a Catechist from the village of Dogatuki.
He added, “Quite a few Catholics have joined the Evangelical Churches in recent years. Recently the priest who was overseeing our area said that he would not be returning any more. But we don’t know which parish we now belong to or who will care for our spiritual needs.”
The Solution
Inspiration and Preparation
I had read in The Far East magazine how teams of Catholics from Columban parishes in Chile and Peru evangelized neglected areas during summer missions. Inspired by this I challenged our "Columban Companions in Mission" team members from the parish of Labasa to do something similar in Dogatuki. The "Columban Companions in Mission" are a group of Fijian laity who support and accompany Columban missionaries in their missionary tasks.
They were soon preparing for a one week summer mission to evangelize Dogatuki. They assembled their "human resources" - Catechists, musicians, youths and experienced adults and their "programme resources" – bible sharing, liturgy, reconciliation and youth themes. Because I was the Columban priest who was to accompany the Companion team to Dogatuki, I was asked to help prepare them with a two day retreat.
After a Mass to farewell the Companion team from the parish of Labasa, they travelled by truck to Dogatuki. This area has about 400 Catholics scattered over six or seven villages. The 18 Labasa Companions divided into five teams to stay in five different villages for the week.
I was assigned to spend one or two days in each village in succession providing opportunities for all to receive the Sacraments of Reconciliation, the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick. I was humbled by the respect and hospitality with which the people treated me and the team members.
Rejection and Healing
An unexpected hitch occurred in Vugolei, one of the villages. The village headman, a Catholic, arrived there shortly after the team and announced that he disagreed with the mission and would not attend because young lay people were conducting the teaching rather than Catechists or priests. The team was shocked.
The village Catechist was humiliated and deeply offended. But he advised avoiding conflict by withdrawing to a nearby village, Vitina, where another team was conducting a program. Some of the families in Vugolei joined the evangelization program there too. The team leader, on arrival in Vitina, was in tears as he recounted this reversal.
I arrived in Vitina on day three of the mission. It was going very well with a large crowd attending, including many young people. I was delighted at the professional presentation by the youth members of the team. They strongly challenged the Vitina youth to be evangelizers themselves. At the beginning of Mass that evening we burned records of personal failings written during an earlier community reconciliation liturgy. Isaiah’s message, in the first reading that evening, to the dispirited Jews in Babylon, spoke deeply to the hurts and doubts of the Dogatuki people.
At the end of the Mass four volunteers gave testimony to how the first three days of the mission had affected them. One of them, the Vugolei Catechist, said that the welcome received from the Vitina people had healed the hurt he felt by the rejection in his own village.
Confirmation and Encouragement
The Dogatuki Catechists were encouraged and strengthened by the four visiting Labasa catechists. Joape, one of these, had been a Methodist lay preacher before becoming a Catholic. Joape had done his own research on answering fundamentalist attacks on aspects of the Catholic faith.
He developed biblically-based answers to 10 challenges and shared these in Vitina. This was a very relevant input since a number of Vitina Catholics, who had converted to Evangelical Churches, were present. Joape shared afterwards that a number of these people came to him personally to ask for further instruction and advice.
An unexpected but welcome result of the week was that the Dogatuki youths, inspired by the Labasa young Companions, decided to organize "Columban Companions in Mission" groups in three villages. Their main project would be to dialogue with other Catholic youths who were being influenced by fundamentalist groups and try to win them back to active participation in the Church.
The week ended in typical Fijian style with a packed Mass at Vitina attended also by people from the other four villages. Afterwards a formal leave-taking by the visitors and thanksgiving ceremony by the hosts (which included gifts of mats, brooms and bottles of coconut oil) were celebrated with many bowls of yaqona and a communal feast. The Dogatuki people appealed to the Companions to come again next year.
The Companions left with a sense of thanksgiving for all that was achieved and with confirmation of their identity as missionaries in their own country.
On my return to Suva the new Archbishop told me that he had unearthed the Dogatuki bank account and that it now stood at over $100,000. He asked me to return to Dogatuki for Christmas with this good news.
Thirty years on, Dogatuki can now begin to be established as a fully functioning parish.
Columban Fr Francis Hoare first went to Fiji in 1973.
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