Anglican Commemoration
Martyrs
September 2 · d. 1942
also known as Martyrs of Papua New Guinea
When Japanese forces invaded Papua New Guinea in 1942, the Anglican missionaries there were ordered to evacuate, and their bishop told them to stay. Most did. Within months a company of them, priests, a nurse, a teacher, and the Papuan evangelist Lucian Tapiedi, had been hunted down and killed for refusing to abandon their people or their faith. The man who killed Tapiedi was later baptized in his victim's name and built a church in his memory, and Tapiedi's statue now stands over the west door of Westminster Abbey among the martyrs of the twentieth century.
In the early months of 1942 the war came to Papua New Guinea, the great island north of Australia, and the Japanese army swept down toward the mission stations of the Anglican church strung along its coasts and through its mountains. The government ordered the missionaries out. Their bishop, Philip Strong, sat at his radio and spoke to them instead, and what he said has been remembered ever since: We could never hold up our faces again if, for our own safety, we all forsook Him and fled, when the shadows of the Passion began to gather around Him in His spiritual and mystical body, the Church in Papua. He left each of them free to go. Almost none of them went.
They stayed at their posts and kept their schools and clinics and chapels open as the army came, and one by one they were taken. A priest, Vivian Redlich, was hunted down soon after celebrating what proved his last Eucharist; a young nurse, May Hayman, and a teacher, Mavis Parkinson, were betrayed and killed as they fled through the bush; others were put to death on the beaches. Across all the islands and every church, of every communion, more than three hundred Christian workers died in those years. The Anglican church keeps a company of them together, and at its heart the one the church has loved most of all, Lucian Tapiedi.
Lucian Tapiedi was a Papuan, a young man of the country itself, raised and trained at the mission as a teacher and evangelist, and when the others fled or were captured he stayed with the missionaries he served and helped them through the bush. He was killed in 1942, struck down by a man of a neighboring people, barely twenty years old. For the Anglicans of Papua New Guinea he became the sign of something the colonial age had been slow to admit, that the faith was now truly their own, carried and died for by their own sons, and not a foreign thing minded by foreign hands.
And then the gospel did what only the gospel does. After the war the man who had killed Lucian Tapiedi came to Christ. He was baptized, and took the name Hivijapa Lucian, the name of the man he had murdered, and with his own hands he built a church at Embi in Tapiedi's memory. The murdered evangelist and his murderer were joined in the one body at the last, the second baptized into the faith the first had died for. In 1998 a statue of Lucian Tapiedi was set over the great west door of Westminster Abbey in London, among ten martyrs of the twentieth century, unveiled before the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury; and there the Papuan teacher stands carved in stone beside Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Oscar Romero, a young man of New Guinea lifted up before the whole church as one who loved not his life even unto death.
The martyrs of New Guinea are recent and well documented, in the records of the Anglican mission, in the dispatches and survivor accounts of the war, and in the careful memory of the church that honors them. When the Japanese invasion reached the Territory of Papua and New Guinea early in 1942, the Bishop of New Guinea, Philip Strong, broadcast to his scattered missionaries that they should remain at their posts; the great majority did. Over the following months at least eight Anglican missionaries, priests, teachers, and medical workers, English and Australian, were killed, among them the priest Vivian Redlich, the nurse May Hayman, and the teacher Mavis Parkinson; with them the church numbers the Papuan evangelist Lucian Tapiedi, born about 1921 and killed in 1942. Across all the churches of the islands, of every denomination, the war's toll of Christian workers ran to more than three hundred.
The commemoration deliberately joins the missionary dead and the indigenous dead in one company, and that is its point. For most of the colonial era the faith in the Pacific had been told as something Europeans brought to others; the martyrdom of 1942, in which a young Papuan died beside the missionaries he served and was honored equally with them, marked the coming of age of an indigenous Melanesian Christianity that has since become one of the most vigorous in the Anglican Communion. The conversion after the war of Tapiedi's killer, who took his victim's name and raised a church in his memory, is recorded in the mission's history; and the placing of Tapiedi's statue at Westminster Abbey in 1998, among the modern martyrs over the great west door, set a Papuan teacher in the front rank of the church's twentieth-century witnesses.
The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea are commemorated on 2 September, near the season of the 1942 killings, in the calendars of the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea, the Anglican Church of Australia, and other churches of the Communion; their liturgical color is the red of martyrdom. The day keeps the whole company together, missionary and indigenous, ordained and lay, of 1942 and (in some calendars) of an earlier killing in 1901.
Their chief monuments are a church and a statue. At Embi stands the church that Lucian Tapiedi's own killer built in his memory after his conversion, grown since into a center of the diocese. And over the west door of Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1998 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tapiedi stands carved among the ten martyrs of the twentieth century, the only Pacific Islander in that company. But the martyrs are honored above all in Papua New Guinea itself, where the day of their death is a feast of the national church, and the memory of those who would not leave is kept as the foundation of its own faith.
Further reading. The fuller story is told in the histories of the Anglican mission in Papua New Guinea and in the wartime memoirs of its survivors; the roll of the 1942 martyrs and Bishop Strong's message are gathered in the standard Anglican biographical accounts.
Online resources. A concise life of the martyrs, with Bishop Strong's message, is at Project Canterbury / Justus. Westminster Abbey keeps the record of Lucian Tapiedi among the modern martyrs over its Great West Door.
British (Received Pronunciation): Bonhoeffer /ˈbɒnhɜːfər/
Almighty God, you gave your servants the Martyrs of Papua New Guinea boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12