First-ever cardinal appointed for Tonga

by PETER GRACE
Tonga is celebrating its first cardinal, with the news that Bishop Soane Patita Paini Mafi has been elevated to that rank.

Cardinal-designate Mafi was born in Tonga on December 19, 1961. He grew up in Tonga and was ordained a priest in 1991 at the age of 29. He is now 53.
He was appointed coadjutor bishop of Tonga in June 2007 and was ordained bishop in October that year.
When he succeeded Bishop Soane Lilo Foliaki of Tonga on April 18, 2008, he became the first diocesan priest to be bishop in the history of the diocese of Tonga.
Fr Line Folaumoeloa, chaplain to the Tongan community in Auckland, said on January 5, that “it is a tremendous joy and honour for us in the small remote South Pacific of Oceania to have a first Tongan cardinal”.
“We thank Pope Francis for acknowledging the universality and diversity in the Church, and for the gift of two cardinals from Oceania.”
The chaplain said the Tongan community has been active in the apostolate mission of the Church and has
produced many missionary vocations, which are being lived out in different parts of the world.
The new cardinal’s father and grandfather were catechists. As a young man, he joined a youth group
at his parish in the settlement of Kolofo’ou, near the capital, Nuku’alofa, on the main island, Tongatapu.
The young man studied at the Pacific Regional Seminary in Suva, Fiji. After ordination as a priest, he
spent four years at Ha’apai parish on an outer island. In 1995, Bishop Foliaki brought him back to Tongatapu to become vicar-general. He was 34, and only five years ordained.
In an interview with Catholic San Francisco in 2008, then-Bishop Mafi said Bishop Foliaki liked the young priest’s ability to relate to people and said he had plans for his future. Those plans included three years at Loyola College in Baltimore. Fr Mafi went there and studied religious education,
graduating in 2000. He then went to Fiji to join a formation team training local priests.
After six years at the seminary, he received the call that the Church would like him to be a bishop — an adjustment that he found difficult. He told Catholic San Francisco that at the time, being the bishop, the shepherd, was exciting and something that made him uneasy, “because I want to be myself.
It’s kind of a mixed feeling, excited but at the same time overwhelming. Now I belong to everybody.”
On his return to Tonga, he went to a nation in transition, with an obvious push among the people and parliament for greater democratic rights for Tonga, a nation that is a monarchy.
Most Tongans are Methodist, but about 17,000 are Catholic. In 2012, there were said to be about 57,000
Tongans and Tongan-Americans in the United States, many in and around San Cardinal-designate Soane Mafi of Tonga. Mateo and Oakland.