Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Worship

​Do not in any way attempt, and do not on any pretext persuade these people to change their rites, habits and customs, unless they are openly opposed to religion and good morals.  For what could be more absurd than to bring France, Spain, Italy or any other European country over to China?(Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide Instruction to the Vicars Apostolic of Tonkin and Cochinchina, 1659)

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This paper provides a short theological and liturgical accompaniment to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander response to the request from the Australian Bishops for a description of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander symbols and rites with recommendations about their use in Catholic rites.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Catholics celebrate their faith in Christ as understood and lived out through their rich cultural traditions.  This is another instance in the history of the Catholic church of faith and culture attending to the gifts of the Spirit and the power of the Gospel[1].  The Holy Spirit is present in the interconnected matrix of languages, kinship, land, Law, ritual patterns, story, dance, song, dreams, deep listening and other expressions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  It is important to be mindful that all Catholic rites emerge from cultural forms and are celebrated within a cultural framework.

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There is an ongoing winnowing of all forms of Catholic worship and their cultural milieux.  This too is part of the faith engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics with their cultures.  There will be elements in traditional culture which for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples may no longer have a place within the Catholic community, or which can be practiced only when, in the eyes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics, they have been transformed.

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It is worthwhile to be upfront here about the occasional tendency to label Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic liturgical practices as ‘pagan’.  What is key is whether parts of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law are in opposition to worship of the triune God.  There is an interesting liturgical precedent for this process of identification in the actions and Mass prayers of Pope Gelasius (d. 496) as he worked to suppress the celebration of the 700 year old Roman festival of Lupercalia.  He built his condemnation of the tradition around two questions which serve well as practical markers of discernment:

1. Is this practice seen as a source of grace outside of Christ?  Was this practice acknowledging the power of forces outside of the Trinity, i.e. giving worship to idols?
2. What is the morality of this practice: Does it reflect the Gospel imperative of love of God and neighbour?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics feel the Holy Spirit within and through creation.  Their understanding is that God’s spirit connects our humanity in community with each other and in communion with all creation.  This deeply felt experience takes place on country, in specific places, in particular experiences, in rituals and within life as a whole. The language that captures this is through the application of the word Spirit, which covers both the felt connection between all things and individual experiences of spirit.  It is felt and seen as a manifestation of the participation of creation in the life of the blessed Trinity.

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‍THE CATHOLIC TRADITION: the acceptance and appropriation of pre-Christian forms into worship

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‍The Australian Catholic church is in a privileged position to be able to embrace the participation in the church of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Catholics.  The universal church also has some well-honed wisdom to bring to the process by which Christian faith appropriated pre-Christian forms of worship.  It is valuable to review some practices in the first millennia of the experience of the Church of Rome as peoples of various cultures, histories and languages embraced Christianity, though some second millennium examples also are offered.  The choice of first millennia examples is significant.  Encounters with indigenous peoples in the second millennia, the age of Western ‘discovery’ of many lands, peoples and cultures, was marked by the ideology surfaced in the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, and the multiple miseries its implementation inflicted on nations and continents.  That Doctrine has only recently been repudiated[2].

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The acceptance and appropriation of pre-Christian forms into worship is a part of the story of the evangelization of Latin speaking citizens of Rome: mid fourth century onwards.

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1. Rome: The evangelization of the Latin speaking Romans

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When the language of the Roman faithful shifted from Greek to Latin, Roman Christianity carried into Christian practice many of its pre-Christian religious forms.  Roman Christians introduced to Christianity their pre-established ways of praying and worship, ways which remain a part of our current rituals in the Roman rite.  Some are:

• Language
  • repetitive build up of descriptors for God (see Roman Canon),
  • prayer to God in a patronage framework (see Collects)
  • translation of the scriptures into the vernacular Latin: a vulgate bible in the language register of the people
  • gradual integration into worship of words (e.g. purus) and actions (e.g. incensation) which formerly had negative connotations for Christians

• Processions, which often had an evangelical purpose heralding faith in the older parts of the city where Roman religious beliefs were held more resolutely,
• Hierarchical ordering, as seen in processions, seating in worship, vestments and leadership structures in parallel to the pre-Christian Roman social order,
• Architecture: churches modelled on buildings in which the public held a rightful place, with a preference for the model of the law courts rather than temples or synagogues.
• Death rituals: funeral rites as a journey of passing over, closely related to their pre-Christian view of death and the soul’s migration to the underworld.

The wider tradition across Christian historyThere are a range of further examples across the history of evangelization by the Church of Rome:

1. The evangelization of the Celts: St Finnian (d.549)
2. The provision of liturgical rites for the Angles: Gregory the Great (d.604), St Augustine of Canterbury (d.604), Abbot Milletus (d.624)
3. The evangelization of the Germanic tribes: St Boniface (d.754)
4. The evangelization of the Vikings: (The Heliand c.800-850)
5. The Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide Instruction to the Vicars Apostolic of Tonkin and Cochinchina, 1659
6. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963) from the Second Vatican Council (The evangelization of the Masai: (a recent response 1960-1980)

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1. Ireland: The evangelization of the Irish Celts

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‍As the monks evangelized the Irish, we have a number of stories of indigenous mystics and shapeshifters actively seeking out the monks to converse with them.  The monks accepted their company, spoke with them, received their wisdom.  The openness of the monks signalled their confidence in the power of Christ, as well as their recognition that these conversations marked the passing of the people from one set of gods to the new God.  It also reflected, both for the indigenous people and the missionary monks, the necessity of retaining the prehistory and heritage of the Celts as they embraced baptism and took up a life now lived in faith.  Here is the view of an expert commentator on an ancient Irish text, found in the appendix to this paper, concerning an interaction between the monk Finnian and the now baptized shaman Tuan.

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Two crucial, interdependent things are happening here.  One the one hand Finnian’s request shows that there is no incompatibility between the old lore and Christian faith, between preaching the Gospel and delving into the pre-Christian past.  On the other, his very acceptance of local tradition places it under the control of the church.  The undying shapeshifter has gone through the waters of baptism.  All that had been in the preserve of his age-old memory has entered into the keeping of the monastic schools.  Henceforth, it is their books which will be the keepers of the past (see John Carey a single ray of the sun: Religious Speculation in Early Ireland Three Essays, Celtic Studies Publications, Andover & Aberystwyth 1999, page 10).

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We can recognize in the approach of Finnigan an acceptance of Celtic lore, collaboration between the newly converted and the missionaries about the elements of that lore which can go forward, and the ongoing presence and protection of ancient lore under the monastic community.  There is a shared appreciation of the wisdom and the history of the people, and its ongoing value.

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‍2. England: The evangelization of the Angles

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‍The somewhat reluctant missionary Augustine of Canterbury was invited by Gregory the Great to work with the Angles.  There is a presumption held by the Pope that different churches across the empire have differing customs concerning the celebration of the Mass, as suited to the culture of that place.  Further, Gregory did not expect the Angles to be passive recipients of the practices of other churches, but to have an active role in their embrace and development of customs suitable to their ways and understandings.  Here is Gregory’s response to Augustine’s question about creating worship suited to the newly evangelized people.

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‍Your fraternity is acquainted with the practice of the church of Rome, the church that gave you nourishment.  I approve of your selecting carefully whatever may be found to be more agreeable to Almighty God, whether in the roman church or that of Gaul, or in any church whatsoever, and of your introducing by a special institution whatever you have been able to gather from many churches into the church of the English, a church still new in the faith.  We are not to love things for places but places for things.  Accordingly, choose from each church whatever is godly, religious and righteous.  Collecting them, as it were, into a small pot, put them on the table of the English so that they also may become accustomed to them. (Book VIII, Letter 37: Augustine’s Questions to Gregory the Great and His Replies, Question 3 in Johnson Worship in the Early Church 4, 4243 /or Book IX 64CHURCH FATHERS: Registrum Epistolarum, Book XI, Letter 64 (Gregory the Great) (newadvent.org)

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‍Gregory offered further advice concerning the Angles in a letter to Milletus, a member of Augustine’s evangelization cohort.  The pope warned against destroying temples, rather he advised repurposing them as centres now of Christian religion.  Gregory advocated evangelization by steps (ascending to the high places by steps rather than by leaps) that move the people ever forward into the fullness of faith:

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‍Tell Bishop Augustine that I have long been giving consideration to the case of the Angles, namely, that the pagan temples in that country should not be torn down even though idols found in these temples should be destroyed.  May water be blessed and sprinkled in these places.  Build altars and deposit relics in them since, provided these same temples are well constructed, we must change them from being places where idols are worshipped to places where the true God is served.  In this way when the people see that these temples are not being destroyed, they may remove error from their hearts and, knowing and adoring the true God, they may hasten with more familiarity to their accustomed places.  Since they habitually slay many oxen as a sacrifice to the demons, they should also have some solemnity of this kind, even though altered, so that on the day of dedication or on the anniversaries of the  holy martyrs whose relics are placed there, they may fashion for themselves tents of the tree branches around these churches that were formerly temples…

Book XI, Letter 56: Letter to Mellitus, Abbot in France, in Johnson Worship in the Early Church 4, 4263 /or Book IX 56 CHURCH FATHERS: Registrum Epistolarum, Book XI, Letter 64 (Gregory the Great) (newadvent.org)

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‍3. Germany: The evangelization of the Germanic tribes

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‍In Boniface, the English missionary to the Germanic tribes, we have another approach, though not entirely incompatible.  The missionary is famed for leveling a sacred tree which was a centre piece of pre-Christian belief in the locality.  However, he then used the wood of the sacred tree to build a chapel on that same site.  By this he called the people to conversion at a place with which they were familiar: i.e. the locus of the pagan gods was destroyed and their power emptied, however the sense of religiosity attached to the site was retained and re-framed as grounds for Christian faith.  Here is the extract from the Life of Boniface:

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‍Suddenly, the oak's vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God (for the brethren present had done nothing to cause it) the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord. Thereupon the holy bishop took counsel with the brethren, built an oratory from the timber of the oak and dedicated it to Saint Peter the Apostle (see Willibald: The Life of St. Boniface, 6 Internet History Sourcebooks: Medieval Sourcebook (fordham.edu)

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‍It is worth being attentive to the importance of trees for pre-Christian worship, and Boniface's willingness to use the very timber of the once sacred oak to construct St Peter's Chapel.

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‍4. Scandinavia: The evangelization of the Vikings

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‍There are common resonances across the conversion and inculturation narratives of the Angles, Celts and Saxons.  Further elements are found in some approaches to the evangelization of the Vikings.  It is worth noting that the gods of these indigenous peoples, and in particular the Vikings, were not understood to be immortal in a Greek or Roman sense.  It was believed that a time would come when the age of the Gods, Woden, Thor and Freya included, would pass, particularly through the great battle of Ragnarök.  There was also a sense amongst the peoples that the time of the ‘old’ gods was at an end, and that the new religion of Christianity would prevail, perhaps with the blessing of the old gods themselves.  In one ancient Viking Christian church there is a tapestry of Wodin, Thor and Freya walking back into the forest and away from the church, seemingly content to leave their stave house to Christ (see G. Ronald Murphy, Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross of the North Oxford University Press, 2013, 64-65).

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In the conversion of the Vikings there are significant symbolic elements.

• Linguistic: there was a re-translation of the Gospels into a single harmonized text (a form of Tatian’s diatessaron) using the language, leadership structure and linguistic genius of the peoples: e.g. with Jesus as the Liege Lord, and the apostles as thanes.  This approach allows for the retention of culture and social structure, even while it is challenged by the Gospel.  Here is part of a reprise on an interaction between Jesus and Peter:

​Peter, the best of all thanes, asked his Commander, “How often, beloved Chieftain, should I forgive people who have done something vicious against me?  Should I forgive the sin of their wicked behaviour seven times before I wreak the vengeance their viciousness deserves?  The Guardian of the Country then answered … (See G. Ronald Murphy, The Heliand: the Saxon Gospel, Oxford University Press, 1992 Song 40, page 106, and also G. Ronald Murphy, The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand, Oxford University Press 1989.

• Architectural: where there is a common realization that the ‘old’ gods have understood their time has come to an end, we find the construction of churches designed as trees, as Ygdrasill, with the church in the shape of a tree, and the interior dominated by a tree trunk around with the liturgy was celebrated.  These are still found still today in Northern Scandinavia and ‘Viking’ England.  Here we have an example of a ‘baptizing’ of the religious spirit of the people as they enter Christianity (see G. Ronald Murphy, Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross of the North Oxford University Press, 2013).

5, Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide Instruction to the Vicars Apostolic of Tonkin and Cochinchina, 1659

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‍The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, established in 1622, was created to coordinate missionary activity across the globe, and in part counter the activities of the Catholic colonial powers.  In terms reminiscent of the words of Gregory the Great to Augustine of Canterbury, the following instruction was given to the first two candidates for the episcopate in Indochina.  First it must be said that, in line with the strategies of Trent, emphasis was placed on the importance of the ordained priesthood, and the recruitment of local clergy as priests and bishops: “the chief reason which has induced the S. Congregation to send you as bishops to these regions is that, by every means and method possible, you so take in hand the education of young people that they may become capable of attaining to the priesthood… and if among them there are some worthy of the episcopate…”[3].

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This, however, is followed up by a reiteration of the ancient advice of Gregory, this time applied to mission rather than worship:

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‍Do not in any way attempt, and do not on any pretext persuade these people to change their rites, habits and customs, unless they are openly opposed to religion and good morals.  For what could be more absurd than to bring France, Spain, Italy or any other European country over to China?  It is not your country but the faith you must bring, that faith which does not reject or belittle the rites or customs of any nation as long as these rites are not evil, but rather desires that they be preserved in their integrity and fostered.  It is, as it were, written in the nature of all men that the customs of their country and especially their country itself should be esteemed, loved and respected above anything else in the world.  There is no greater cause of alienation and hatred than to change the customs of a nation, especially when they go back as far as the memory of ancestors can reach…Never make comparisons between the customs of these peoples and those of Europe.

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‍6. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963)

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‍The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy recognized the genius and talents of various races and peoples.  It was open both to the incorporation of indigenous elements into the Roman rite (37) and the development of new rites and families of rites that were responsive to cultures, languages and traditions that had no direct relationship to European culture and religious history (40).

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‍37. Even in the liturgy, the Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not implicate the faith or the good of the whole community; rather does she respect and foster the genius and talents of the various races and peoples. Anything in these peoples' way of life which is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error she studies with sympathy and, if possible, preserves intact. Sometimes in fact she admits such things into the liturgy itself, so long as they harmonize with its true and authentic spirit.39. Within the limits set by the typical editions of the liturgical books, it shall be for the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority mentioned in Art. 22, 2, to specify adaptations, especially in the case of the administration of the sacraments, the sacramentals, processions, liturgical language, sacred music, and the arts, but according to the fundamental norms laid down in this Constitution.

40. In some places and circumstances, however, an even more radical adaptation of the liturgy is needed, and this entails greater difficulties.

119. In certain parts of the world, especially mission lands, there are peoples who have their own musical traditions, and these play a great part in their religious and social life. For this reason due importance is to be attached to their music, and a suitable place is to be given to it, not only in forming their attitude toward religion, but also in adapting worship to their native genius, as indicated in Art. 39 and 40.

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‍Notes

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​[1] The Second Vatican Council had given some very clear guidelines on this point, recognizing the presence and action of the Holy Spirit not only in the Church but also outside it, and above all in other religions. The Spirit has been at work in the world since the beginning of time: Without doubt, the Holy Spirit was at work in the world before Christ was glorified (AG 4). God's mysterious action in people's hearts, which we attribute to the Spirit, is mingled with human elements, which are not always positive. It (the Church) purges of evil associations those elements of truth and grace which are found among peoples, and which are, as it were, a secret presence of God; and it restores them to Christ their source... (Ad Gentes 9)  The Holy See - Vatican web site

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‍[2] See the Joint Statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development on the “Doctrine of Discovery” (vatican.va), March 30, 2023.

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‍[3] Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide Instruction to the Vicars Apostolic of Tonkin and Cochinchina (1659), from J Neuner and J Dupuis (eds), The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, Revised Edition (New York: Alba House, 1981) 308-310.  For some commentary see the citation in Peter Phan, In Our Own Tongues: Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2003) 25-26.

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