Ki te ingoa o te Matua

One of the nice things about being Catholic is that you can walk into any Catholic Church in the world and know what is going on, no matter what language is being spoken or what the church itself looks like. Bryan and Jane had been to many Catholic churches in their lives and did not expect to be too surprised by anything they would find in Auckland. After all, this was an English-speaking country with ancestral ties to Britain, just like the US. They figured that there would be some differences, but no more than you would get in the US going from parish to parish. Some people like rock-influenced music and some think that any instrument besides an organ has no place in a church; some priests use their homily time to perform deft acts of literary criticism on biblical passages while others like to start and end with a joke; and, of course, there are churches where it's so quite you can hear the little kids fidgeting under the pews and others where the you fear that the stained-glass windows are going to shatter with the force of the congregation's participation. This was the spectrum along which Bryan and Jane anticipated finding the Catholic Church in New Zealand. What they actually found, however, was quite unexpected.

By law, there are two official languages in New Zealand: English and Maori. Maori are the native peoples who sailed from the Polynesian Islands to New Zealand sometime in the fourteenth century. Today they make up about 18% of the total population of the country, outnumbered as a minority group by both Asians and Polynesians. Still, as the original New Zealanders their culture and their language are protected by the government in Wellington. Instructions and some signs are printed in both English and Maori, much like Spanish in the US, except that in the US, there are a lot of people who actually speak Spanish.

With this in mind, it should not have surprised Bryan and Jane to be standing in St. Patrick's Cathedral in central Auckland and be greeted with Ki te ingoa o te Matua, o te Tamaiti, o te Wairua Tapu. Amene. Confused at first as to what was going on, they soon realized that the priest was leading the congregation in the sign of the cross in Maori. The priest, of South African origin, was leading a congregation that was 80% Asian and 20% European (with 2 Americans), in the Irish-immigrant built St. Patrick's in Maori prayers. Talk about your multiculturalism. This must be the face of the new Church.

The rest of the service continued on in English, and Bryan and Jane were comforted to see that Auckland churches pulled their musical repertoire from the same Glory and Praise book that many US churches use: plenty of Marty Haugen and David Haas. Much of the service, in fact, was familiar to Bryan and Jane, living up to the Catholic claims of uniform universality. That is until they got to the Nicene Creed. The Kiwis, it turns out, use the same translation of the ancient Latin text as do their British cousins. Jesus is not born of the Virgin Mary, but made became incarnate; and he did not suffer, die, and was buried, but suffered death and was buried. Small changes that don't change the meaning of the Creed, but it is enough to throw off the rhythm of something you've been intoning for over 25 years. The Our Father they found to be different as well. Kiwis ask God the Father to save them from the time of trial instead of asking Him to lead us not into temptation. Again, not really a significant change in terms of meaning, but enough to make Bryan and Jane feel like poinsettia-lily Catholics. It looked like going to church was something else they were going to have to adapt to.