A Piety Able to Cope:foreword

The following chapters on Jean-Claude Colin and the Missions of Oceania are not meant to become a history of the missions in Oceania. After the older accounts of the bishops Blanc and Elloy, of the Fathers Mangeret, Montfat and Nicolet, of Brother Joseph Ronzon, and of many others, excellent historians have been at work. To name a few: Kevin Roach, Reiner Jaspers, Hugh Laracy, Ralph M. Wiltgen and K.R. Howe. I have gratefully made use of their labours.

Nor are these chapters a biography of Jean-Claude Colin. After the older but complete biographies by Jeantin, Gobillot and others, Donal Kerr wrote the life of Colin up to his election as superior general in 1836: as close to a definitive biography as one can get. To produce a second volume on Colin, the superior general, will take someone equally gifted in that special genre littéraire that is biography. However, before anyone takes on that monumental task, a lot more will have to be known of his many activities as the superior general of the Society of Mary.

Colin studies have perhaps focussed a little one-sidedly on his spirituality. As long as we are concerned with the period before 1836, the one-sidedness is understandable. Once we look at Colin from 1836 to 1854, other questions arise: how he handled authority and governed the young Society, how he organised the formation and selection of candidates and the opening of new works, how he dealt with authorities in the Church and in civil society, how he managed the Society finances and coped with the failures of any human undertaking.

The following chapters only concern Jean-Claude Colin as the superior general of a religious order entrusted with a huge mission field on the other side of the globe. What was his role in the foundation of the Marist missions in Oceania? How did he handle his responsibility for an enterprise that he would never see with his own eyes, that he found hard to imagine, and with which it was most difficult to communicate? What did he understand of the processes going on in the Pacific Islands? How did he assess the information he got, and how did he come to the decisions only he could take but that did determine in part the growth of the Church in New Zealand, in Polynesia and in Melanesia? In other words, how did Colinian spirituality stand up to the practicalities of the Marist undertaking in Oceania? How did it cope with running a foreign mission?

In order to present a coherent and plausible account of what happened, I shall at times draw tentative lines in the gaps between the documented facts. That means an amateur historian risking a guess here and there. It is my intention to make clear in the text, or in special footnotes, where I am going beyond the documented facts, making assumptions or drawing conclusions. The reader will judge for himself.

Some insights presented in these chapters will differ from what has been written in the past about Jean-Claude Colin's role in the missions, which is precisely why I think it worth¬while to present these pages for the consideration of my readers.

This is a provisional edition, prematurely published as a contribution to the Colloquium Colin and Oceania to be held in Suva in August 2007.

Jan Snijders, sm.