Columban Fr. Frank Hoare has been on mission in Fiji for over 50 years. On April 4, 2025, his two books, A Missionary Diary and A World of Difference, were launched at the Suva Cathedral. A Missionary Diary was launched by the Hon. Sashi Kiran, Fiji’s Minister for Women, Children and Social Protection.
The World of Difference was launched by the Archbishop of Suva, the Most Rev. Dr. Peter L. Chong. This was a Pacifican launch.
The launch began and ended with a hymn led by the Columban Companions in Mission from Raiwaqa, the Columban parish together with the main Suva mandali (an Indo-Fijian prayer group). They opened with the Fijian composition of “We belong to Christ and not to ourselves” (Christi simus non nostri, in Latin). A friend of Fr. Frank’s, Vintika Kumar, did a beautiful Indian dance halfway through. The final hymn was “Make Me a Channel of Your Love.” The books were on sale at a bargain price for the event.
Fr. Frank came to Fiji in 1973, and he began the study of the Hindi language immediately. Fiji’s two main ethnic groups are the indigenous Fijians and the Indo-Fijians who were first brought to Fiji by the British Colonial administration in the nineteenth century, mainly as indentured workers on sugar plantations. This means that Hindi and Fijian are the two main languages used in Fiji. English is the common language. The Society of St. Columban has been insistent from the beginning that the first task of a missionary is to learn the local language. Our cofounder, Bishop Galvin of Hanyang, had a fine grasp of Mandarin Chinese.
After his study of Hindi, Fr. Frank took on Fijian and became proficient in this also. Later he was invited to study psychology in the Institute of Psychology of the Gregorian University in Rome. He followed this with an MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. In the years since, he has written several anthropological-pastoral articles for various magazines. He has now put these articles together in the book, A World of Difference.
Archbishop Peter had a Chinese father and a Fijian mother and grew up in a Fijian village speaking Fijian and immersed in Fijian culture. The Archbishop introduced this book and mentioned some of his own experiences with spirit possession.
The World of Difference has two articles on spirit-possession and its pastoral care. Another article deals with the conflict that arose in an Indo-Fijian Catholic community when a ritual approved by the Indian Bishops but also used in Hinduism was introduced in Fiji. The final article reflects on the symbols used in different religious communities and how inter-religious dialogue is needed so that we can understand one another.
The Hon. Minister, Sashi Kiran, has been a friend of Fr. Frank’s for some 20 years and launched A Missionary Diary. In the 1990s, after the first Fiji coup, Fr. Frank set up an organization called People for Intercultural Awareness that brought people of different cultures together in Fiji and helped them to overcome their stereotypes and work together. At the launch, she witnessed that she was greatly helped by this.
In 2001, she set up and became Executive Director of an organization called FRIEND (Foundation for Integrated Rural Development and Development). This helped rural people to generate income and is quite successful with chutneys, flour, greeting cards, herbal teas and other items now being marketed. At the last election, she resigned from FRIEND and ran for election. She was elected and became Assistant Minister for Women, Children and Social Protection and in 2024, she became the minister. She spoke glowingly of the book, saying it reflects the heart of Fiji and calls Fiji to be the way the world should be.
Fr. Frank kept a diary of his experiences over the years. The stories in A Missionary Diary are incidents that caught his fancy and tell of people, events, aspects of culture and various incidents from his missionary life. The book has 170 pages and most stories have a photo illustration. It is sensibly priced at 10 Fiji dollars (about 5 US dollars or 5 euro), which is within the price range of working people in Fiji where the daily wage would only be about 60 Fiji dollars.
An early story in the book tells of Fr. Frank’s first day in Naleba. He spent two years here to get to know the community, Catholic and others, very well. He still visits them to this day. Now it is their children and grandchildren, many of whom live in Suva, that he meets. Naleba was a community of about 20 Catholic families in a settlement about fifteen miles out of Labasa town on Fiji’s second biggest island.
Fr. Pat McCaffey dropped him off at the chapel there, introduced him to a nearby Catholic family and returned to Labasa. It was simple living, no electricity, no fridge, no gas, and no oven – but he did have a kerosene stove. And there was a toilet and shower outside.
Loud knocks at daybreak the next morning woke him. It was Gabriel, a mentally-challenged young man, anxious to see that he was up and about early, like everyone else in the community. Breakfast, after morning prayer, consisted of tea made on the kerosene stove with crackers and peanut butter.
He then explored his surroundings. One of his neighbors was a Muslin family who called out to him in a friendly fashion. Chatting with them he discovered that their daughter had a cut on her foot. He got his first-aid kit, cleaned the wound and put a plaster on it. Her mother invited him to lunch, and he was glad to accept.
The next day, he went further afield but did change the dressing on his neighbor’s foot and, gratefully, he again accepted lunch. The next morning Gabriel arrived with the message that his grandmother wanted to talk to him.
When he spoke to her, this fine old lady looked agitated. She said to him, “Since you came here, you have had lunch each day with a Muslim family. You are supposed to come here to my house like the other priests. You belong to us, not to them.”
Columban Fr. Frank Hoare continues to live and work in Fiji.
