The police have stepped up patrols around places of worship, but nothing has changed. On the morning of Monday, September 9, once again, overwhelmed parishioners went to a police station to report a fire at their church: this time, it was the one in Balade, in the commune of Pouébo, in the northeast of the territory. The whitewashed stones resisted, but not the door and the wooden altar of the building, modest in size but rich in symbolism: it was there, in 1843, that the evangelization of Grande Terre began, ten years before France declared, in exactly the same place, that it was taking possession of New Caledonia.
An act – the sixth in less than three months against a Catholic building – that the Archbishop of Noumea, Michel Calvet, who has been based on the Rock since the end of the 1960s, does not understand. “I am asked by dozens of people every day to find an explanation. I am still looking.”sighs the Marist father.
The link between colonization and religion? “The Church has proven that it has been on the side of the indigenous people”he believes. Particularly in terms of education, public schools only opened their doors to the Kanaks in 1953. It was therefore the missionaries, Catholics on Grande Terre, Protestants in the Loyalty Islands, who allowed them to access education. But religious questions are also often mixed up with the land problem, which has never been completely resolved in New Caledonia.
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Michel Calvet recognizes well “misunderstandings, even clumsiness”but also recalls that in 1993, on the occasion of the 150the anniversary, celebrated in Balade, of the first mass said in New Caledonia, he himself, in front of six thousand faithful, the vast majority of whom were Kanak, invited “to recognize the wrongs done to the Melanesian people (…). It is the Gospel itself that leads us to ask for forgiveness.
“Satanic Rite”
An investigation has been opened at the Noumea public prosecutor’s office for « each of these facts. As for the causes, they seem multiple. On social networks, we see an assimilation between religion and colonization. There can also be a phenomenon of massive alcoholism which encourages playing with matches. Sometimes, it is certainly a bit of both”assures the public prosecutor Yves Dupas, who does not exclude, concerning the destruction by flames of the church of Saint-Louis, in Mont-Dore, “a satanic rite”.
In July, after the first fires, the president of the New Caledonian collegiate government, Louis Mapou, condemned « acts, tainted with irresponsibility, [qui] undermine the principles of fraternity and sharing which constitute the foundation of values on which Caledonian society was built”According to this pro-independence leader of the Kanak Liberation Party (Palika), “no discontent or anger can justify them”.
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