It is over now, the hiatus between Popes, and the impressions fading, but there is one which lingers….
“We are without a Pope,” said the young priest to his university parish. “Without a Pope” it was an unsettling phrase. We don’t usually think of it that way. We are caught up in the story of the Pope just dead and speculation about the Pope to come. “Without a Pope”—suddenly the enthusiasm with which the Roman crowds respond to the age-old cry habemus papam! seems to echo in our own feelings.
In that time without a Pope one could envision the cardinals hurrying to Rome from the far-flung outposts of the church—from Upper Volta, from Argentina, from Santiago de Chile, from Winnipeg set in the prairies, from perilous and turbulent Zaire, from teeming Calcutta. Even with the technological marvels of modern transportation the journey for some of them is arduous.
In my mind’s eye I could see Cardinal Pio Taofinuʻu leaving Apia in Western Samoa on one of the twice-weekly flights to Pago Pago to begin there the long flight across the Pacific, across Asia and the Middle East to Rome. I wondered how he and his concerns for his people would fare in the conclave, and with the new Pope.
The cardinal is one of those who are living signs that the church can no longer be thought of as European. He is the first Polynesian to be made cardinal, and, unlike many indigenous bishops who were products of the older missionary training, he has escaped total “transculturization.” He remains very much a Samoan. His conversation with visitors has none of the nostalgic eagerness for news which marks the exile, the man who who has studied abroad and never quite come home again. (This is often very marked in American clerics who have studied in Rome.) He is rather a man taking every opportunity to make his people and their relation to the church understood. Visitors are potential messengers.
Meeting him for the first time has much of the quality of the intense face-to-face encounters of a small enclosed society which Margaret Mead comments on in her Letters from the Field. I first saw him at his office in a little building on a hillside above Apia. We had set out, my friends and I, in the heavy wet air and fog of a rainy morning in the tropics. The heights behind the little city are precipitous and, in that weather, the approach road seemed narrow, slippery, and dangerously steep—a far cry from the sweeping drives to other chanceries I have seen.
We found the cardinal a pleasant-appearing man of 55, large even among a people whose leaders are notable for their size, but trim and fit. He wore the suntans of the tropics and his manner was dignified, simple and unassuming. To anyone inured to the impersonality of manner, the pre-occupied half-attention, and the standardized affability of other prelates—all part of the armor of office—his warmth and direct interest was startling and made him seem open, even vulnerable.
He served the hearty morning tea himself, although his secretary, a young priest from California, had joined us. To those who have read of the concept of fa’a Samoa, according to the Samoan way, the cardinal seems to have it in his bones. There are traces in his hospitality and his gift-giving. He was disturbed, for example, to have been invited to a party for us before he could give one himself, as tradition indicated, and he appeared at that party bearing two beautiful fans from the Tokelaus for each of us. But he does not share in the unrealistic insistence that the old ways of Samoa exist unchanged, an idea to which the leaders of newly independent Western Samoa give at least lip service.
Cardinal Pio Taofinuʻu, for example, has endured criticism for founding an old people’s home. That families do not take care of their old is contrary to the concept of fa’a Samoa. The fond belief is that all the old are welcomed and cherished in their extended families. “But when I go to the villages, old people come up and tell me different stories. As we become a money culture, some of the old ways are going,” he said sadly. “The home has filled quickly, and the sisters are gaining vocations. Taking care of the old is a vocation our Samoan girls can understand.” Even some of those who denounced the institution as a betrayal of their way are seeking admittance for relatives.
The cardinal is distressed, on the other hand, at Roman insensitivity to the dignity of Polynesians. It was felt almost an insult to the people of the other territories in his diocese (American Samoa and the Tokelau Islands) when the diocese was named Apia. He had asked that it be renamed for all three. Behind that request is the complicated system of equality and courtesy among the chiefly nobles of the islands, but also a churchman’s concern for how his church is perceived. It should not have been hard for Rome to understand.
More difficult, perhaps completely opaque to the curial mind, is the cardinal’s feeling that the appointed lay leaders in each Samoan village not be confused with, or equated with, the lay catechists on which Rome relies in other countries. The presiding lay couple in each parish, he seems to say, in some way legitimizes the church in the Samoan mind. Priests they can understand, that priests can be celibate they can accept, but that a church should be ruled and led by celibates alone is too far from the proper composition of a society. The lay leaders are concomitant leaders, not less than the clergy, although the power of administration may reside in the clergy, explains the cardinal. This makes sense in a culture where each chief has a “talking chief” at his side, where the “Queen of Samoa” outranks her brother, the prime minister, but has neither office nor official title, and where numerous other interlocking dualities, which pose contradictions to the western mind, are the very foundation stones of community.
Bearing this in mind and struggling to understand it, one comes to the conclusion that the first Polynesian cardinal has instinctively hit upon a brilliant way of indigenization. To train lay catechists and deacons in the face of a shortage of vocations to the celibate priesthood is a solution congenial to Rome; to his people it is a natural way to structure the church. What exists now in Samoa now only in germ may be the shadow of the Christian community of the future. And may be the future when next we are “without a Pope.”
