Religion and Diaspora: Community Creation in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, the Case of Antoine Garin and the Catholics of Howick and Nelson

Abstract

Antoine Marie Garin was a Catholic missionary who lived in New Zealand from 1841 until 1889. A member of the Society of Mary, the society to which the Pope had given the task of evangelizing Western Oceania in 1835, Garin worked for seven years with Maori in the Bay of Islands and Mangakahia, Northland, before beginning a lengthy career as a parish priest to the settlers of Howick and Nelson. He is best known for his contribution to Catholic education while parish priest of Nelson.

The records kept by Marist missionaries like Garin are fascinating for the way in which they provide an often-overlooked perspective on nineteenth-century New Zealand. As neither ‘colonizing’ British settlers, nor ‘colonized’ Maori, the Marists were in a special position to witness and describe events from their own unique, French viewpoint. Garin’s records from his time as parish priest of Howick and Nelson are particularly valuable for their ability to challenge Miles Fairburn’s thesis on the atomism of nineteenth-century New Zealand society. As Fairburn notes, nineteenth-century New Zealand migrants had to struggle with atomism: the breaking of ties to family, friends and community that occurred upon migration to such a distant part of the world. With specific reference to religion, Fairburn’s thesis paints the nineteenth-century churches as poorly-attended and socially marginal. At a general level, it depicts colonial New Zealand as being gravely deficient in its social organization. An analysis of Garin’s manuscripts, however, shows the extent to which differences of religion, as of ethnicity, could be sources of colonial community.

This paper will consider the community-building that took place within Garin’s Catholic parishes in Howick and Nelson through the optics of diaspora studies. While recognizing that today the term ‘diaspora’ is most readily applied to an ethnic rather than religious minority, it will propose a renewed use of the term in a religious context. The Catholics in New Zealand established their own institutions, including schools and orphanages, and Hibernian and Fenian societies, while Catholic publications and popular literature maintained links with the wider Catholic world. In his role as parish priest of Howick and Nelson, Garin worked to establish such Catholic infrastructure and foster Catholic links and communities. He fought for the rights of the Catholic minority in New Zealand, while at the same time adapting to predominantly British, Protestant, late nineteenth-century New Zealand society.