Rosaries and Statues: Mediating Divine Intervention in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea

Anna-Karina Hermkens

doi:10.3390/rel12060376

Abstract

In the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARoB) in Papua New Guinea, the changes of Vatican II led to significant Church reform, creating “Liklik Kristen Komuniti” (small Christian communities) that gave more responsibility to the laity. Moreover, as elsewhere in the world, Charismatic Catholicism was introduced and embraced. At the same time, private devotions, and in particular devotions to Mary, became immensely popular and powerful in Bougainville. This is partly due to the Bougainville crisis (1988–1998), which caused immense suffering, but also triggered a surge in popular devotions as people looked for spiritual guidance to deal with the hardships of the crisis. This paper shows how in the context of social and economic upheaval, charismatic popular devotions became increasingly influential with rosaries and statues becoming important mediums in facilitating healing and socio-political renewal. This shows the strength of popular devotions and the importance of material religion in particular. It also elucidates how popular devotions in Bougainville are part of global Catholic developments, as well as transnational practices that place Mary in the center of devotional practices.

Highlights

During the crisis, other denominations destroyed our statues
While in the past every village depended upon a special male caretaker to make offerings at particular sites in the Bougainville landscape to the spirits and mediate for their intercession, Catholicism, and Marian devotion in particular, allows everybody, irrespective of gender, to mediate with and embody the divine.7. This notion that it is possible to have an intimate individual relationship with God has been reinforced through the Charismatic movement, which developed in the Catholic Church as part of the Second Vatican Council reforms
I will elucidate the impact of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) in Bougainville, in particular in relation to its realignment of Mary within a broader Christological framework

Summary

Introduction

Aventists [SDA] threw a cement statue of Mary into the sea, but she floated. In Tubiana Parish, a man who believed in ancestors shot a statue, calling it “a giaman lotu long stone” (false belief in stone). 2019, I address the power of religious objects, and in particular the rosary and statues and pictures of Mary, to provoke and escalate conflict as well as settle it and mediate social and political change in Bougainville. While this semiotic ideology is clearly anchored in Catholic theology, people’s lived religious experience creates tensions with the institutional Church This is partly due to the fact that many Catholic Bougainvilleans draw upon local cultural understandings of spiritual presence, materiality, and agency, and because the question of the relationship between popular piety and the Liturgy, and in particular the validation of the former over the latter, has arisen throughout the history of the Catholic Church This will be followed by a description and analysis of Marian devotion in Bougainville and the significance of material religion in mediating divine intervention in particular

Marian Devotion in Bougainville

Vatican II in Bougainville

The CCR and Marian Devotion in Bougainville

Mediating Divine Intervention

Findings

Conclusions