The Roman Catholic Diocese of Tarawa and Nauru (Latin: Dioecesis Taravana et Nauruna) in Kiribati and Nauru is a suffragan diocese of the Archdiocese of Suva. It was erected as the Vicariate Apostolic of Gilbert Islands in 1897, with see in Tanaeang (on Tabiteuea) from 1936 to the end of 1950s, and later elevated to as the Diocese of Tarawa in 1966. There was a name change in 1978 and, in 1982, the diocese was split from the Mission sui iuris of Funafuti. The diocese currently has jurisdiction over all of Kiribati and Nauru.
History
The first missionaries
The first Christian missionaries to arrive in the Gilbert Islands were Protestants from Hawaii and New England, the first of whom arrived in November 1857. The most notable of these missionaries was Hiram Bingham II, a Congregationalist minister and son of Hiram Bingham I, an early missionary in Hawaii. Bingham and his wife translated the Bible into Gilbertese, wrote school books, and authored a major dictionary (published posthumously), before leaving the islands in the early 1860s due to ill health.
In addition to Bingham's conversions, many of the Gilbertese natives had been taken by blackbirders in the 1870s to work on plantations on other islands in the Pacific, where they were met by Catholic missionaries. Two of these converted laborers, Betero and Tiroi, returned to Nonouti and instructed the local people about Catholicism. They built eight small churches, where people of different villages assembled each Sunday to sing hymns and recite prayers. By 1888, Betero and Tiroi had already baptized 560 people and were instructing and additional 600. As the number of Catholics grew, the two men wrote letters to many Catholic bishops requesting missionaries and priests.
Arrival of Catholic priests
In response to a letter Betero and Tiroi sent to Samoa, three members of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, Father E. Bontemps, Father Joseph Leray, and Brother Conrad Weber, left in a tiny schooner from Sydney in 1887 and arrived on Nonouti on the Feast of the Ascension, 10 May 1888. They anchored at the entrance of a wide, shallow lagoon, and took a dinghy to land on shore, where a crowd of local people were waiting. The trip to the shore was taking several hours, so the two priests decided to celebrate Mass on the dinghy some distance from land as it was close to midday. So the first Catholic Mass on the Gilbert Islands took place on a dinghy in the Nonouti lagoon. When the missionaries arrived on shore, they visited the church, which they found to be large and well built, and already equipped with an altar, altar cloth, and crucifix. The following morning, Mass was celebrated in the church, supplemented by Gilbertese hymns and prayers. After Mass, a statue of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart was placed in a visible location.
Arrival of religious sisters
In 1892, Father Bontemps, accompanied by two young Gilbertese men, left for Europe on a trip to gain assistance for the Gilbert Islands mission. They visited Rome, and in 1894 visited Issoudun, France, where the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, the sister congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, had their convent. Bontemps asked the Superior General, Mother Marie Louise, for sisters for the Gilbert Islands. Marie Louise had long been a loyal helper of the Missionaries, but in this case she hesitated due to the exceptional isolation of the Gilbert Islands. However, she hesitantly agreed and named seven sisters, the oldest of whom was 25, to be sent to the islands.
Bontemps and the sisters left Issoudun in April 1895, and on the return trip stopped for a short stay with the sisters at Kensington, Australia. They also stopped in Sydney, where two more sisters joined them, bringing the total to nine. They arrived at the Gilbert Islands in August, after a difficult journey on the Archer, an old, slow, and unsteady ship, which had to be used because nobody wanted to risk a new ship in such rough and reef-strewn seas.
On 28 June 1897, it was established as Apostolic Vicariate of the Gilbert Islands (Insularum Gilbertinarum in Latin) from Apostolic Vicariate of New Pomerania.