Maori pastoral leadership
Marguerite Osborne
In 2012 Pa Gerard Burns invited Marguerite Osborne to become the acting chairperson of the Maori Pastoral Council to establish links with Catholic Maori throughout the Archdiocese of Wellington.
Kapiti-based Marguerite shares her thoughts as a Maori woman and about the Council she chairs, Te Kahu o Te Rangi – The Cloak of the Sky.
I come from a family of 11 with Irish, English and Māori heritage. My mother was a matriarch and the cornerstone of our family. She was a Catholic and my father was a Ratana. He put the needs of his wife and children first. My faith was instilled in me since infancy and I thank my mother for that.
When I first came to the Kapiti area I didn’t feel at home or part of the community. I sought solace in the chapel. After some months I was approached by a member of our Māori community to join in the celebration of the Mass in Māori in the parish chapel. What a blessing. I felt at home, being nurtured by the richness of our language, being totally immersed in the chants and prayers, and hymns of our faith and more importantly being welcomed and accepted into the parish Māori community. This is the manaakitanga – the nurturing, the looking after, welcoming and whanaungatanga – the love being extended to each other as one family.
I’m involved with the Wellington Archdiocese Catholic Centre and liaising with Māori Pastoral Services. I’m trying to get strategies in place to support the work we are doing. I’m also a Kuia at Our Lady of Kapiti parish. Māori are few in number here and my role is to encourage Māori to return to the fold.
I’m passionate about the Māori Miha (Mass) and reaching out to others to embrace it. There is a special connection when one is living one’s faith and praying in one’s own language. This comes back to the Māori sense of family where you belong and are accepted, not judged. You are at peace with yourself.
Within the Catholic Church, there is unity, but that does mean uniformity. We need to let people be themselves and honour and respect one another.
Faith is a personal journey and everyone has the right to express prayer in their own tongue. From a Māori perspective there is a sense we still have to prove ourselves in the Church. For example, people ask, ‘Why do we have to have the Miha?’
Through the Council we are here to safeguard Māori Catholicism within our diocese. To preserve the Māori language, hymns and prayers, and to slowly encourage integration of our Māori Christian values with the Catholic faith, eg in Baptism, in prayer, in death – the tangi.
We want to integrate the Māori language into the celebration of the Mass and the Eucharist because there are some parts of our liturgical calendar that do not have any Māori content at all. So we are working to open or broaden the Māori context within the Catholic Church here.
Faith is individual. You can’t lump us all together, culturally or as individuals. Maori spirituality – wairoa – is deep rooted and comes from within.
Mary is the mother of us all and our model for female inspiration, which is important because as a consequence of our Church’s history, women are often behind the scenes.
We work closely with the various Catholic Women’s groups. As members of the Catholic Women’s League our motto, ‘Faith and Service’ encapsulates what our roles as women in the Catholic Church embody.
To succeed in our journey we have to pull together as one family – whanaungatanga.