In this article Columban missionary, Frank Hoare, examines incidents of spirit possession and witchcraft accusations in a Catholic Fijian village. Spirit possession has a communal dimension in socio-centric cultures and the tensions of the community are played out in and through the messages of the spirit. Crises of evil are understood as essentially moral and connect the individual, community and spirit world and the community is energized to resolve the situation and ward off the evil. The recognition by a community of individuals who have effective spiritual power may surface alternative dormant ritual economics and politics based on a traditional cosmology that may be more or less articulated to the dominant cosmology.A foreign missionary should beware of ethnocentrism and the reductionism that dismisses the local idiom and traditional cosmology. Instead, crises of evil offer an opportunity for deeper dialogue between the Christian gospel and traditional beliefs and practice. Study of the history, social relations and culture of the community is time well spent and the missionary should rely on mature local Christians. A liturgy that takes community crises into account can provide a wider context of meaning for the concerns of the community.
In this essay, veteran Columban missionary Frank Hoare analyzes a dispute in the Fiji Indian community over the possibilities of employing hierarchically-approved, Indian adaptations to the Liturgy in a parish in Fiji. Hoare suggests that at bottom the dispute was not only about popular religiosity versus official religious practice, nor was it even about the limits of syncretism in Christian faith and practice. Rather, it was a dispute that went to the heart of power and authority structures within several of the Fiji Indian villages in the parish. Ultimately, Hoare concludes, inculturation in the Fiji Indian context needs to go beyond importing practices from Indian Christianity and translating Hindu practices for use within Christian contexts: "... a true and deep inculturation cannot result from borrowing forms from India, even if approved by ecclesiastical authorities, but will only come about through ongoing dialogue with the Fiji Indian Catholics as they try to hear and understand the gospel faith which transcends all cultures and express it in symbols and forms of their lived experience."
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