The nation that declared itself of God

El lema oficial de Samoa —grabado en su escudo de armas, proclamado en su constitución, vivido en cada aspecto de la vida pública y privada— es «Fa’avae i le Atua Samoa»: Samoa está fundada en Dios. No es una frase retórica. Es una declaración programática que los samoanos toman en serio con una consistencia que asombra a cualquier visitante occidental acostumbrado a los laicismos del hemisferio norte.

En Samoa, el domingo es sagrado. Las tiendas cierran. El tráfico se detiene en las horas de misa. Las familias enteras —incluyendo a los primos que viven en la otra punta de la isla, los tíos que han vuelto de Auckland para la visita anual, los jóvenes que normalmente viven en el mundo de las redes sociales y los auriculares— se reúnen en la iglesia del pueblo con una regularidad que no admite excusas. Y en cada una de esas iglesias del pueblo, en las decenas de comunidades católicas que salpican las islas de Upolu y Savai’i, la Virgen María ocupa un lugar central en la vida devocional.

Samoa is one of the most religious countries in the world, not as survey statistics but as a living reality. The Christian faith - in its different denominations, with the Congregational Church as a historical majority and the Catholic Church as the second or third significant presence - structure time, social space, community identity, power relations, the way of understanding the family and death and the feast. God is not a private matter in Samoa: it is the very foundation of society.

The first Marists: the long way to Samoa

In 1836, Pope Gregory XVI entrusted to the Marist Fathers the evangelization of the Western Pacific. Among the islands assigned was Samoa - then called the Sailing Islands for European cartographies, for the extraordinary ability of its inhabitants at sea. But the arrival of the Marists took years to produce: the Pacific is immense, the ships were slow, and there were other urgent islands where to first establish the mission.

It was not until 1845 that the first Catholic missionaries set foot in Samoan land. It was Father Louis Violette, Father Gilbert Roudaire and Brother Jacques Peloux - the latter an expert carpenter and masonry who would build some of the mission's first structures with his own hands. They arrived in an archipelago where the Protestant missionaries of the London Missionary Society had already been in place for almost two decades, where conversion to Protestantism had progressed quickly thanks in part to the support of influential leaders, and where the Marists would be welcomed with the distrust that is reserved for those who arrive late on an already occupied ground.

The Marists settled with patience. They found their space in communities that the Protestants had not reached, or in families looking for something different. The competition between Catholics and Protestants was intense for decades - with the backdrop of the colonial rivalry between France and Britain - but the Samoans, pragmatic and relational, were able to navigate between the two traditions with the same ability with which they sailed the Pacific.

The Teine or the Atua: the Samoan name of Mary

When the Marists missionaries began to preach Mary in Samoa, they had to find words in the Samoan language to describe who they described. The word they used to present to the Mother of God - Teine or Atua, "the Daughter of God" or more precisely "the young woman of God" - resonated in the Samoans in a way that no missionary had calculated.

In traditional Samoan culture, the figure of the taupou - the young high-ranking virgin who represented the honor of her people in political ceremonies and negotiations - was of great social importance. It was the most sacred figure in the community, treated with a reverence that mixed the political, the aesthetic and the spiritual. When the Samoans heard of Mary - a pure young woman of high lineage, chosen by God above all women - they found in her something that her own cultural categories could recognize.

It's not that Mary is just a taupou. But the existing cultural category created an opening, a door of recognition, by which love for Mary could enter more easily than it would have had without that bridge. The wise missionaries - and the Marists, in general, were - were able to read that resonance and use it not to simplify the faith but to direct it towards it.

The Cathedral of the Assumption of Apia

In the centre of Apia, the capital of Samoa, the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary rises with this combination of solidity and openness that characterizes the religious buildings of the Pacific. It is not a European-sized cathedral - Samoa is not Europe and is not intended to be it - but its presence in the heart of the city is real and unmistakable. It is the center of the Catholic life of the island of Upolu, the place where the great feasts of the liturgical year are held and where families bring their children to baptism, to marriage, to death.

The history of the cathedral is the history of the Catholic mission in Samoa: it began with provisional structures, it was growing with every generation of faithful, it was expanding and consolidating as the Catholic community settled and multiplied. In the 1880s, the school of the Marist Brothers in Apia was already a recognized institution. In 1864 the mission was opened in Tutuila - the island that today is American Samoa. The Samoan Catholic faith was built stone by stone, not at once.

Today, the Cathedral of the Assumption is also a space of memory. It reminds the priests and brothers who died in Samoa giving their lives for the mission - some of malaria, some of exhaustion, some of sea accidents - and celebrates the faith of the generations of Samoans who became the evangelizers themselves, missionaries in their own families and in the communities of the diaspora.

The 2009 tsunami: faith in water and mud

On 29 September 2009, an earthquake of magnitude 8.1 shook the Pacific bottom to the south of Samoa and generated a tsunami that hit the coast of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga with speed and violence that left no time for reaction. The waves reached areas no one had imagined the sea could reach. Whole villages of the southern coast of Upolu were erased in minutes. The final figures reported more than 180 deaths in American Samoa and Samoa.

In Lepa, on the south coast, only the church and the welcome sign to the village stood after the tsunami. It is an image that concentrates on itself something that the Samoans already know: that in the moments of maximum destruction, what remains is faith.

The Catholic Church in Samoa was one of the first institutions to organize for the emergency response. Caritas Samoa coordinated the distribution of water, food and construction materials. The priests and sisters worked in the early days as logistics coordinators, emotional counselors and mediators between the affected communities and international aid organizations. In a society where the Church is part of the very fabric of the community, its role in the emergency was not optional: it was constitutive.

«El tsunami nos enseñó a todos que lo único que no puede quitarte el agua es lo que llevas dentro. La fe. La familia. El fa’asamoa.» —Testimonio recogido en la costa sur de Upolu, 2009.

El fa’asamoa —la «manera samoana» de ser y vivir, el conjunto de valores, jerarquías y prácticas que estructuran la sociedad samoana— resultó ser, en los meses de reconstrucción, tan resistente como la catedral de Lepa. Las familias extendidas se organizaron para cuidar a los suyos. Los jefes coordinaron la reconstrucción de las casas comunitarias. Las iglesias abrieron sus puertas como refugios y centros de distribución. Y la fe religiosa —que en Samoa nunca ha estado separada de la vida comunitaria— fue el marco que dio sentido a lo que de otro modo habría sido simplemente un desastre sin sentido.

Marian hymns in Samoan

There is a song that Catholic Samoans know in memory, which is sung at weddings and funerals, in parish parties and in family meetings, that migrants teach their children born in Auckland or in Los Angeles as if it were an identity password: the Hail Mary in the Samoan language. It is not a literal translation of medieval Latin: it is an adaptation that has passed through generations of Samoan singers and has, over time, acquired its own musicality, a cadence that has some of the rhythm of the sea and some of the heat of the volcanic land of Upolu.

La música sacra samoana es polifónica por naturaleza. Los samoanos cantan en partes desde tiempos inmemoriales —el canto coral es uno de los valores culturales más profundos del fa’asamoa—, y cuando esa tradición polifónica se encontró con los himnos marianos que trajeron los misioneros, el resultado fue una fusión de una belleza que a veces quita el aliento. Los coros de las parroquias samoanas —con sus bajos profundos, sus tenores luminosos, sus sopranos que parecen alcanzar el cielo— son quizás el argumento más convincente de que la inculturación del Evangelio no empobrece ni a la cultura ni a la fe: las enriquece a las dos.

The Samoan diaspora: the faith that crosses the Pacific

Today, there are Samoans in almost all Pacific countries and beyond: in New Zealand - especially Auckland -, in Australia - Sydney and Melbourne -, in Hawaii, in California, in Utah. They are communities that have maintained their cultural identity with a tenacity that migration scholars cite as an example of diasporic cohesion. And in that identity, religious faith - with the Virgin Mary in a central place for Catholics - is one of the fundamental pillars.

The Samoan parishes in Auckland celebrate the Assumption of Mary on August 15 with a solemnity that exceeds that of many parishes in the same city. The Mass is held in Samoan. The choir fills the church with harmonies that make you think of the breeze of Upolu. Families come dressed in their best suits - live colored suits, flower crowns, puletasi skirts for women - and after the mass, in the parish hall, a meal is served that is in itself a liturgy: pork, taro, palusami, oka, coconut desserts. Faith is eaten. Communion is real.

The second-generation Samoans - born in Auckland, raised between the Pacific and the globalized world, with one foot in each world - sail with a skill that amazes their parents between Samoan culture and host culture. Many have maintained Marian faith not because it has been imposed upon them but because they have found in it something that the outside world does not offer them: a belonging, a root, a mother who does not judge and does not abandon.

"God lives in Samoa"

There is a phrase that Samoans use with a nature that initially surprises the foreign visitor: "O le Atua e nofo i Samoa," God lives in Samoa. It's not a tourist marketing phrase or a poetic overstatement. It is a theological statement that Samoans do seriously: that in this place of the world, in these volcanic islands surrounded by coral reefs, God has chosen to make his dwelling in a particular way.

The Virgin Mary - Teine or Atua, the Daughter of God - is, in this context, the one that makes this abode possible. The one who brought God into the world. The one who brought him to the men. The one that the Marists brought to the Pacific and the Samoans received with the same heat with which they welcome any visitor who reaches their beaches: with generosity, with curiosity, with the genuine desire to make him feel that he has arrived at his home.

When one listens to the Hail Mary sung in Samoan by a chorus of a hundred voices that fills an Apia church on August Sunday, he understands that Samoa is perhaps the country where the phrase "God lives here" sounds more natural. Not because God lives alone in Samoa - he is greater than any geography - but because the Samoans have endeavoured, generation after generation, to prepare the best possible place to sit at home.