The 15 islands of the end of the south

Disperses between American Samoa and the Islands of the Society, in a sea that seems to have no banks, the Cook Islands are fifteen pieces of land and coral that the Pacific Ocean has let stand on its surface as reminders that the world is much larger than we imagine. Some are mountainous and green, like Rarotonga, with its peaks that sink into the clouds and its valleys where silence has texture. Others are flat atolls, almost to the water level, so low that in storm days the sea threatens to swallow them: Manihiki, Penrhyn, Rakahanga.

In total, they do not reach 20,000. But there is a detail that changes the perspective: there is more cook islanders - so they are called, with pride, in their own language - living outside the islands than within them. Most are in New Zealand, especially in Auckland, where they form one of the most active and culturally cohesive Polynesian communities in the Pacific. And that diaspora carries with it, intact, the faith that was born in the atolls: faith in Christ, devotion to Mary, the song they learned from their grandmothers.

The arrival of the first evangelizers

The first great missionary movement in the Cook Islands came at the hand of the London Missionary Society - Protestants, with all the energy and severity of the 19th century Protestantism - in 1821. The Reverend John Williams landed in Rarotonga with the conviction that it was possible to transform those Polynesians, and did so, although at the price of prohibiting their dances, their songs, their garments and part of their culture. It was an evangelization that sowed much wheat but also, we must recognize, much pain.

The Catholic missionaries came later, with a different history and a more modest but not less significant presence. The Catholic diocese of Rarotonga was erected to serve the Catholic communities of the islands, which, although minority - Protestantism remains the majority tradition through the Cook Islands Christian Church, the heiress of the London Missionary Society - maintain a deep and well-rooted faith.

The Cathedral of San José in Avarua, the capital of Rarotonga, is the only Catholic cathedral in the archipelago. It is not a monumental building or aspires to be a human-sized church, built with local materials, open to the Pacific wind, where the image of Mary presides over the altar with the simplicity of places where faith does not need to be real. Catholic cooks treat her like a neighbor: they bring flowers from the garden, they speak to her in her tongue, they trust her with things that they would not tell anyone else.

The tuki mene: when faith sings with the body

To understand the Marian devotion of the Cook Islands, we must first understand the menie tuki. The word imene comes from the English hymn - anthem -, and the tuki refers to the coup, the rhythmic impulse that characterizes this unique vocal style. The menie tuki is a form of capella singing - without any instrument, only human voices - where the melodies are built in layers: a soprano that carries the main melody, called perepere; a deep bass that marks the rhythm with a kind of rhythmic grunt controlled; and a chorus of intermediate voices that weave harmonies of a complexity that leaves any Western musicologist in a nob.

What makes the menie tuki unique is that end of sentence: the voice suddenly falls in tone, as if the melody were to sink into the Pacific to emerge renewed in the next verse. It is a sound that does not resemble anything a European hopes to hear in a church, and yet it is deeply sacred, deeply devout, deeply political.

Born in the context of the missionary Protestantism of the 19th century, the Mumene tuki was also adopted by the Catholic communities of the islands, which adapted it to its own Marian hymns. Thus, in the Cathedral of San José de Avarua, you can hear the Ave Maria sung in the Māori language of the Cook with that falling voice that makes the heart stop for a moment. Polynesian faith found its most authentic voice in the Mimene tuki: not the voice of the European missionary, but that of the people who received it and made it his own.

"The tuki menie don't learn it from a book. You learn to listen to your mother. And your mother learned it from her. And so even the first who sang for the Virgin on these islands." - Testimony of a singer of Avarua.

Manihiki: the chapel of the pearls and the Virgin of the Fishers

1,200 kilometres north of Rarotonga, in the middle of an ocean that in its quiet days looks like a silver mirror, is the atoll of Manihiki. It is a crown of land and coral that surrounds a lagoon of extraordinary transparency, and that lagoon hides one of the most precious treasures in the Pacific: the black pearl oysters that have given the Cook Islands world fame.

Manihiki has a few hundred inhabitants. There is no conventional airport, no luxury hotel, no road around the atoll because the atoll is so narrow that there is no room for it. But there is a small church, and in that church there is an image of Mary that the Manikians call, with the simplicity of the sea, the Virgin of the Fishers.

Manihiki divers are immersed up to ten meters deep in apnea - without oxygen bottles - to collect oysters. It's a beautiful and dangerous job. Every morning, before entering the water, some pass through the chapel. It's not always a long visit. Sometimes it's just a moment, a look at the image, a phrase that is said in a low voice or in silence. But that moment they take with them when they dive, and those who have survived unexpected currents, and divers that got complicated, at times when the water didn't want to release them, say that in those seconds they had something that held them from within.

The feast of the Virgin of the Fishermen in Manihiki has no fixed date on the universal liturgical calendar: the community celebrates it when it can, when time allows, when the ships are on the atoll. A procession around the lagoon is improvised, with the image handheld by young fishermen while the older ones sing. It is one of those liturgies that no theological manual has described, but that Heaven, if he listens, can only recognize as prayer.

The rosary on the Christmas plane

There is an image that sums up more precisely than any statistics the Marian devotion of the Icelandic cooks in the diaspora. Every year, in the weeks before Christmas, the flights of Air New Zealand and Air Rarotonga that connect Auckland with Rarotonga are filled with cooking islanders that return home. The bags are full of gifts, of food not found on the island, of clothes for children. And at some point in the flight - which lasts about three and a half hours - someone takes out the rosary.

It is not always an organized initiative. Sometimes she is a grandmother who begins to pray in a low voice, and her children join, and then the seat neighbors who know her from the parish of Auckland, and then someone on the other side of the hall who recognizes the words even if she knows no one. The plane is flying over an ocean that has no bottom, between the skies that in these latitudes have a blue that does not look like that of any other place, and inside the plane a thread of Ave Marías is connecting Auckland with Rarotonga as if the rosary was the real bridge between the two sides of the diaspora.

Reaching the islands for Christmas is, for many cook islanders, the most intense experience of the year. Meeting the elderly, bathing in the lagoons of childhood, going to mass in the church where one was baptized. And at that Christmas Mass, listening to the tuki mene of the whole congregation gathered - those who live on the island all year long and those who have returned from Auckland, Sydney, Los Angeles - is to understand that faith can survive the diaspora, can survive the asphalt and winters of the northern hemisphere, can survive everything that the modern world puts between people and their roots.

The Immaculate Conception of Avarua

The feast of the Immaculate Conception, on December 8, is in Avarua one of the most felt Marian celebrations of the Catholic liturgical year. The Cathedral of San José is filled with flowers - the flowers of Rarotonga are of an abundance and a color that seems excessive for those who come from the northern hemisphere, but that in the Pacific is simply normal - and the mass is celebrated with a solemnity that contrasts with the kind informality of daily life on the islands.

What most draws the attention of an external visitor is the mix of generations. The grandparents who remember learning Marian prayers in the mission, the parents who taught them to their children before they emigrated, the young people born in Auckland or Sydney who return with a faith that their parents sowed in them patiently and that the catechism of the diaspora has kept alive. The Virgin Mary is, in the Catholic Cook Islands, the thread that sews the diaspora with the land of origin, the present generation with the previous ones, the Pacific with the global world in which its children live.

The voice of those who did not return

Not all of the diaspora's island cooks can return to the islands. The plane ticket costs, the work permit cannot always be taken, the grandmother is no longer there to wait for you and the trip loses its urgency. There are cook islanders who have not stepped on Rarotonga for decades and have, however, not lost their Marian faith: they practice it in the parish of South Auckland, in the community of the neighborhood, in meetings that organize on weekends to keep the Māori-language cook and the songs of grandparents alive.

At those meetings, sometimes someone starts a tuki mene. No prior notice or trial is required. The voices are found alone, as if they had been waiting for the signal, as if the body remembered what the mind sometimes forgets. And in those harmonies that go up and down and go up again, there is something that goes beyond nostalgia: there is an affirmation of identity, a prayer that says "we exist, we are here, we are children of these islands and of this faith, and the Virgin knows where we are even if we are far away."

The Cook Islands are small. But the faith their people carry around the world is great as the ocean they came out of.