Vanuatu. The name already sounds to a distant horizon, to a shallow ocean, to land that the sea barely conforms to. There are 83 islands spread over 1,300 kilometres of archipelago in the South Pacific, between the equator and the tropics. Active volcanoes that don't just turn off. Languages that are counted for dozens - more than 100 different languages in a country of just 300,000 inhabitants -. A natural and human biodiversity that leaves the visitor speechless. And in that unlikely archipelago, Mary's history has chapters of an intensity that few of the world's lands know.

This is the story of how the Gospel came to the islands that were then called New Hebridas, how much it took to take the faith between 83 volcanic islands, and how the Virgin found a place in the heart of the peoples of modern Vanuatu.

The New Herbrids before the Gospel

When the first missionaries arrived at the archipelago we call Vanuatu today, they found a world in which the sacred and the daily were inseparable. The peoples of the islands - melanesians of origin, with a cultural complexity that astonished European ethnographs - organized their lives around systems of ceremonial degrees, ritual dances (kastom dances), of exchanges of goods which were also languages of alliance and identity. The spirits of the ancestors (toggle) were present in each stone, in each tree, in every stream of water.

The missionaries who arrived in the 19th century had to learn, often at a blow of error and pain, that this world was not an empty territory waiting to be filled. It was a complex spiritual universe that demanded respect rather than substitution.

The Marist Missionaries: 1887 and the first stable footprint

The systematic Catholic presence in the archipelago began in 1887, when Bishop Hilarion Frayasse of the Society of Mary (SM) sent four missionaries with several native assistants to the New Herbrids. They were not the first to try: other missionaries had passed through the islands before, and several had paid for their boldness with life.

One of the names that the Church keeps from that period is that of brother Blaise Marmoiton - although his history belongs more properly to New Caledonia, where he was martyred in 1847. But his example inspired those who later came to Vanuatu: the mission in Melanesia was a territory of real risk, where faith could cost life, and those who agreed to go knew it.

The marists who arrived in 1887 first settled in Port Vila, which would be the future capital of the archipelago. From there they extended their presence to the larger islands: Holy Spirit (the greatest of all), Malakula, Egate. They learned the local languages. The first texts were translated in Bislama, the English Creole that was emerging as a common language of the archipelago. They built chapels with local materials. They adapted. They were wrong. They tried again.

The Bislama and the Avemaria: to pray in the language of the people

The Bislama is one of the most fascinating linguistic stories in the Pacific. It is a Creole that was born in the 19th century of the mix of English with the local languages of Vanuatu, in the times of labour trade and exchange between islanders and sailors. Today it is the frank language of the country: the language that allows a inhabitant of the Holy Spirit and one of Tanna to understand, even if they have completely different mother tongues.

When the missionaries began to evangelize in Bislama, faith gained a new dimension. The Avemaria in Bislama sounds like this:

When prayer comes to your lips in the language of your childhood, your market, your daily conversation, something changes. Faith is no longer a foreign matter to become something of yours. The Avemaria in Bislama is that: the Virgin who speaks the language of the people.

Holy Spirit: the greatest island and its Marian devotion

Holy Spirit is the largest island in the archipelago. It has something that impresses the one you visit: a scale you didn't expect, a forest that looks endless, rivers of turquoise blue water that sprout from the mountains as if the interior of the island kept a secret ocean. In Luganville, its main city, one of the most active Marist missions of the archipelago was installed.

During World War II, the Holy Spirit was transformed into one of the Pacific's largest allied bases. Tens of thousands of American and Australian soldiers arrived, with their teams, their ships, their planes. The island changed forever. And with the soldiers came also something that the missionaries had not anticipated: a wave of popular American devotion, with images of the Virgin brought from military chapels, plastic rosaries distributed by chaplains, novies prayed in the barracks.

When the war ended, many of those rosaries and images were left on the island. The families of Luganville and the villages of the interior adopted them as their own. The faith that the Marist missionaries had planted received an unexpected irrigation from the hands of soldiers who had passed through the island on the way to other fronts.

Jon Frum and the mystery of the "charge cults"

On the island of Tanna, in the south of the archipelago, a movement was born in the 1930s that fascinates anthropologists and has, from the perspective of the history of religions, a remarkable complexity: the Jon Frum movement. Jon Frum is a mysterious figure - no one knows with certainty whether he was a real man, a spirit or a collective creation - that in Tanna's tradition he announced that Americans would bring abundance, that the traditions of casket They should be restored, and that missionaries (who were accused of suppressing the dance of the kava and ancient customs) were the problem, not the solution.

The Jon Frum movement, like others cargo cults From the Pacific, it came up in part in response to colonization and Christian evangelization: it was a form of cultural resistance, of affirmation of the Melanesian identity to the world that came from outside. Every February 15 - on the day of Jon Frum - the followers of the movement in Tanna perform parades with red flags and bamboo spears, in a ceremony that mixes elements of the kastom traditions with references to the Second World War and the American world.

The curious thing - and what he says a lot about the complexity of the human soul - is that in some peoples of Tanna and other islands, the anti-missionary resistance of the Jon Frum and the Catholic Marian devotion coexist in the same symbolic universe in unexpected ways. There are families who pray the Rosary and also participate in the kastom ceremonies. There are traditional dances that incorporate processions with religious images. The human being has an amazing ability to integrate universes that Western logic would separate into stagnant compartments.

"In Vanuatu, Mary does not compete with the ancestors. She knows the ancestors were already there when she arrived. And treat them with respect. That's why the people respect her."

The island of Ambae and the evacuates who carried Mary into their arms

In 2017 and 2018, the Manaro volcano on the island of Ambae - one of Vanuatu's most active - forced the mass evacuation of the entire population of the island. Thousands of people had to leave their homes, their fields, everything they had built, and leave on ships to the neighbouring islands without knowing if they could return.

Among the things that the Ambae evacuates took with them - in addition to the indispensable to survive - were religious images. Images of the Virgin who had been in the chapels of the peoples, in the domestic altars, in the bags of the grandmothers. Images that had passed through several generations of hands, which were already part of the family and community memory of the island.

In the displaced camps of the neighbouring islands, these images of Mary were placed in visible places, converted into the center of community prayers. Every night, the evacuates of Ambae gathered around the Mother to pray the Rosary, to ask for protection, to ask for the grace of being able to return to their land. It was the same scene that had been repeated in the Vunapope internment camps during World War II, in the villages inside Solomon during the ethnic conflict, in the anti-cyclone shelters in Fiji. The Mother accompanies the people in exile. He doesn't stay in the temple when his children have to leave.

Ambae's could have come back. The volcano calmed down. The houses had to be rebuilt, the fields replanted, all started again. The images of Mary returned to their places. And the faith that had carried them in the arms during exile was made, if it could, deeper.

The "kastom dances" and the Marian processions

In many communities in Vanuatu, the casket - which are both art, politics, ritual, history and prayer in the broadest sense of the word - have found ways to integrate with Marian devotion. Not in a systematic or planned way: it has occurred in an organic way, over decades, in the silent laboratory of community life.

In some islands, processions in honor of the Virgin are carried out with the rhythms and movements of traditional dances. The dancers wear their kastom ornaments - feathers, shells, body paintings - and also, somehow integrated into their suit or hand, a Marian element: a medal, a rosary, a green branch as a symbol of the life that Mary brings. It is not syncretism, in the sense of confusing what should not be confused. It is inculturation: the Gospel that takes the gestures of a people and elevates them to its fullness.

The Marist missionaries who see these processions - those who have had the patience to be here for decades and to let faith grow at their own pace - say that at those times they feel that evangelization has come where it had to go. Not the head, but the body. Not abstract logic, but concrete dance. Mary has entered the dance of the people. And the people have entered Mary's dance.

• 1887Bishop Frayasse sends four Marist missionaries to the New Herbrids. I begin with systematic evangelization.
• 1906The New Herbrids become French-British condo. The missionary presence is divided between Protestants (English-speaking) and Catholics (French-speaking).
• 1930sThe Jon Frum movement emerges in Tanna, in part in response to Protestant evangelization.
• 1942-1945World War II. Holy Spirit becomes a great ally base. Thousands of American soldiers bring their Marian devotion to the archipelago.
• 1980Independence of Vanuatu (30 July). The new State recognizes the role of the Churches in building the nation.
• 2017-2018Manaro volcano eruption in Ambae. Mass evacuation. The evacuates carry the images of Mary in their arms.

Vanuatu today: faith between volcanoes and ocean

Vanuatu is one of the countries with the highest density of religious beliefs per inhabitant in the world. In these 83 islands there are Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Adventist, Pentecostal, Kastom, Jon Frum followers, and combinations of all the above that challenge any simple category.

The Catholic Church is an important presence, especially in the islands of the north (Holy Spirit, Malakula, Ambae) and in the capital, Port Vila. Marists remain the country's main Catholic missionaries, with a history of uninterrupted presence that is already over the century. They have built schools, hospitals, rural development programmes. And above all they have given time: the time that needs a faith to become something of their own, something that the people call their own.

Mary - the Mama Mahe, as they call her on some islands - looks from her images of wood or paper to that endless ocean. To the volcanoes that never end to sleep. Around the 83 islands where their children pray the Avemaría in Bislama, they dance the kastom with medals to the neck, and carry their image in arms when the volcano reawakens.

She's here. He's always been. And it will be.

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