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- Contents Category: Religion
- Review Article: Yes
- Article Title: Paradise
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Ralph Wiltgen’s history of the founding of the Roman Catholic church in Oceania stands within a definite tradition: the recording by members of the various Christian denominations of the activities and personalities involved in their proselytisation of the heathen inhabitants of the Pacific islands. Works of the earlier century sought to eulogise the missionaries and encourage the faithful back home to continued support. Wiltgen’s approach shows the influence of far more sophisticated attitudes and scholarship. He has consulted dispersed and complex archival sources written in several languages, he has pieced together his intricate and detailed narrative in painstaking fashion, to describe the growth of Roman Catholic missionary activity in the Pacific from its commencement in Hawaii in 1825, to the existence of an arch-diocese, eight dioceses and eight vicariates apostolic in 1850. Pride in this achievement underlies his writing but does not lead into rationalisation or polemic.
- Book 1 Title: The Founding of the Roman Catholic Church in Oceania 1825 to 1850
- Book 1 Biblio: Australian National University Press, $24.50 pb, 610 pp
- Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
- Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
It is work, however, which no matter how scholarly, stands from the mainstream of academic Pacific historiography, the emphasis of which is not on the activities of European institutions and powers, but on the experience of the indigenous peoples in their reaction to culture contact and acculturation. Recent missionary studies by Niel Gunson, David Hilliard and Hugh Laracy, in their central concern with the impact of Christianity on island peoples rather than on the decision-making of church hierarchies, are widely different from Wiltgen’s study in their perception of relevance. Those involved in the narrow history of the Catholic church will find Wiltgen's book useful; it holds little for contemporary Pacific scholarship, and nothing at all for the general reading public caught up, as the dust jacket describes it, with ‘the magic of the South Seas’. It is, incidentally a most lavish and beautifully produced volume.
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