Contents
1. Syncretism and the absorption of Matariki into Catholic language and liturgy
2. The construction of spiritual authority: atua / deities / gods, manuscript mystique, and modern religious manufacture
3. From religion to public system: imagery, thresholds, altars, education, and cultural normalisation
4. Global convergence: syncretism and the path toward a one-world religious framework
1. Syncretism and the Absorption of Matariki into Catholic Language and Liturgy
This is a story about syncretism, about the manufacture of antiquity, and about the public marketing of a modern spiritual system.
It is a story about how something modern is framed as ancient, how something sectarian is repackaged as universal, and how something once dark, esoteric, and forbidding is softened into something beautiful, child-friendly, and publicly untouchable. It is a story about how a religion is marketed first through books, art, museums, education, and government recognition, and then offered to the Catholic Church as though it were spiritually compatible, enriching, and even sacramentally resonant.
That is the real issue here.
This is not only the making of a modern Māori religion. It is also the making of new gods for a dying Catholic Church.
Culture has become spirituality.
Spirituality has become liturgy.
Liturgy has become syncretism.
And syncretism is being marketed as beautiful, precious, rooted in deep spiritual roots, and as having strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith.
That is what makes the New Zealand Catholic bishops’ Matariki language so revealing. The National Liturgy Office described Matariki as having “deep spiritual roots” and “strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith.” [1] In the later text, the language becomes explicitly devotional, referring to “the wondrous mystery of Atua,” “the Eternal One,” and “the Holy One,” and ending with the prayer formula, “Through Christ and in the perfect unity of the Holy Spirit, we pray.” [2][4]
This is not mere civic acknowledgment. It is not simply politeness toward a public holiday. It is an attempt to absorb another spiritual framework into Christian language and prayer.
This is not a small matter of wording. To describe Matariki as having “strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith” is not a gesture of cultural courtesy. It is an astonishing theological claim that a belief system publicly constructed from 1995 onwards should be linked back to a faith two millennia in age. [1][2][4][8]
And the problem goes further. The Catholic text does not stop at polite acknowledgement. It speaks of “the wondrous mystery of Atua who loves you” within a ritual specifically created to honour and celebrate Matariki. [2][4] In Catholic language, mystery is sacred language. Bread and wine are sacred mysteries. Sacraments are sacred mysteries. So when this language is placed inside a Matariki liturgical framework, the boundary between cultural acknowledgement and theological incorporation has already been crossed. [2][4]
That is syncretism.
The problem is not that a church notices a national holiday. The problem is that boundaries which should remain clear are gently dissolved. A distinct cosmology, with its own sacred beings, sacred narratives, sacred symbolism, and sacred claims, is brought inside Christian speech and presented as spiritually harmonious. What should have remained separate is now blended, and the blend is marketed as reverent, inclusive, and morally elevated.
2. The Construction of Spiritual Authority: Atua / Deities / Gods, Manuscript Mystique, and Modern Religious Manufacture
And once that happens, an obvious question follows:
Who, exactly, are these atua / deities / gods?
Te Papa’s Matariki material does not present the stars merely as astronomical markers. It says each visible star has unique characteristics that Māori acknowledge and honour, and it assigns them domains and meanings. Pōhutukawa is linked with the dead and Te Ara Wairua. Hiwa-i-te-Rangi receives wishes and aspirations. Matariki herself is presented as the mother of the others. [5][6] This is not neutral sky-watching. It is a cosmological and spiritual system.
So this is not simply culture being celebrated. It is religion being spiritualised, beautified, and universalised for public consumption.
A great deal of the modern presentation rests on mystique. The word manuscript is part of that mystique. It sounds ancient, solemn, and self-authenticating. A 400-page family document described as a manuscript is made to sound like something comparable in aura to the Dead Sea Scrolls — something ancient, weighty, and inheriting its authority from age itself. But what is actually being described is a family-held written record, passed to Rangi Mātāmua in 1995, and brought into public circulation only then. [8] That does not make it worthless. But it does mean the atmosphere around it is inflated. Something recent is being presented with the solemnity of something timeless.
Who copied it down, compiled it, or passed it along is not the point. The point is that the religious content itself appears to trace back to one originating voice. What is now being treated as a spiritual framework of public significance seems to rest, at its source, on the recollections and narratives of one old tohunga. That is an extraordinarily narrow base for something now being elevated into national reverence. [8]
What had largely been treated in public writing as an astronomical and seasonal event is now being repackaged as a spiritually saturated religious system and then presented as though it had always stood in that form. [7][8]
The same pattern appears in the imagery.
The human-faced Matariki imagery now circulating publicly is not ancient inherited iconography. Te Papa credits the key Te whānau Matariki image to Te Haunui Tuna, 2016, supplied by Rangi Mātāmua, and links the framework to Matariki: The Star of the Year, published in 2017. [5][7] Te Papa’s later teaching resources use personified illustrations which are visibly more polished, more educational, and more classroom-friendly. [6]
A pattern emerges. What began in a harsher, stranger, more forbidding visual form has been steadily beautified, softened, and sanitised. The tattooed heads become more luminous, more approachable, more teachable. The whole thing is reshaped into something suitable for children, schools, public institutions, museum displays, and church settings. What was once dark and esoteric becomes a spiritualised Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star — a marketable religious aesthetic for a modern audience.
3. From Religion to Public System: Imagery, Thresholds, Altars, Education, and Cultural Normalisation
The same process can be seen not only in language and imagery, but in physical space.
Outside a Catholic youth centre in New Zealand, the figures on display are not Christ, not Mary, and not the saints, but Māori pou representing tūpuna / ever-present ancestral spirits. The point here is not decorative style, but spiritual symbolism. In that worldview, tūpuna are not religiously empty motifs. They are understood as spiritually present, spiritually real, and still able to be addressed through karakia.
So what is being honoured at the threshold of a Catholic site is not merely culture in the harmless civic sense, but ancestral presence drawn from another spiritual system.
That is syncretism in visible form.
And the threshold matters. What stands at the entrance tells you what is being honoured. A church, school, or youth centre declares something by what it chooses to place at its gate. If the imagery at that threshold does not witness to Christ, but instead gives visual honour to another sacred order, then the issue is not ethnicity, not style, and not artistic diversity. It is spiritual symbolism.
More serious still is St Joseph’s Church, Hiruhārama / Jerusalem, on the Whanganui River Road northwest of Whanganui, built in 1893, where comparable symbolism appears in the altar itself. [9]
This is why the whole exercise increasingly looks like marketing.
A modern spiritual framework is dressed in the language of antiquity, supplied with contemporary art, popularised through books and museum interpretation, amplified by state recognition, softened for children and classrooms, and then offered to institutional Christianity as something spiritually enriching and morally beautiful. It is marketed to government as heritage, to the public as identity, to schools as education, and to churches as reverence.
Let us also be clear about something else.
This is not a racial critique. It is a religious critique.
Not all Māori believe this. Not all people of Māori ancestry accept this spirituality as truth. And not everyone promoting it is Māori.
What is being criticised here is a belief system — one with sacred beings, sacred narratives, sacred symbolism, and expanding claims on public life. It is therefore open to the same scrutiny, criticism, and rejection as any other religion. The constant attempt to shield it from criticism by wrapping it in ethnicity and cultural sensitivity is part of the strategy. A religion is being protected from scrutiny by presenting it as identity. That confusion should be rejected.
And like all religions, it appeals to some of the deepest instincts of the human mind: the desire to believe in an afterlife, and the desire to believe that life carries some higher meaning, sacred purpose, or hidden order.
That is part of its appeal. It is also part of its power.
4. Global Convergence: Synchretism and the Path Toward a One-World Religious Framework
Nor is this pattern confined to Catholicism. In much of the historic mainstream — Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian — the drift has often been toward race politics, equity ideology, grievance moralism, Polynesian spirituality, and syncretism, all sanctified under the language of justice, reconciliation, and inclusion.
In parts of the charismatic and Pentecostal world, the drift often runs in another direction: toward Zionism, Americanism, prophetic theatre, and Israel-centred geopolitics. Different idols, same collapse. Different symbols, same surrender. Christianity is no longer standing over the world in judgment. It is being colonised by rival political and spiritual systems from both left and right.
But the Catholic example is especially revealing because of its sacramental claims. Once a church says that another sacred system has deep spiritual roots, that it has strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith, and that it can be folded into blessing and prayer, the boundary has already fallen. Then anything can be absorbed. Any symbol can be harmonised. Any sacred vocabulary can be blended and blessed. What cannot be defended doctrinally is softened rhetorically and sold as beautiful, precious, and spiritually enriching. [1][2][4]
And this follows a very old pattern.
Rome built empires not only by conquest, but by absorption — taking in the gods, cults, and sacred symbols of the peoples it ruled and reorganising them within a wider universal order. The Pantheon stood as a monument to that habit of integration. After Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312, the Edict of Milan in 313 established toleration for Christianity within the empire, and by 380 Theodosius I had adopted Nicene Christianity as the Christian norm. [10][11][12][13] The political form changed, but the old Roman habit of absorption did not simply vanish. Too often, where the Catholic Church spread, local spiritual systems were not cleanly rejected, but absorbed, reframed, and renamed.
The language of universality remained. But the substance of that universality changed.
And this is where the analysis must widen.
Because what is happening here is not confined to New Zealand, and it is not confined to Catholicism.
Across international institutions — including those operating through the United Nations system and forums such as the World Economic Forum — there has been an increasing emphasis on shared global values, cultural convergence, interfaith cooperation, and the language of one human family. [1]
This is not about Māori people in general, but about a narrow class of university-based “prophets”, cultural theorists, and institutional promoters. Antarctica, the wairua of water, the airwaves, 5G, outer space — the scientific proof may never come. But science is not the point. Religion is. If “mātauranga Māori science” fails, Te Ao Māori spirituality may still win. Its ultimate victory would be a chapel to the Matariki atua / deities / gods at the Vatican — the Roman and universal heart of a converged one-world religion.
At one level, this language appears benign. It speaks of unity, sustainability, inclusion, and mutual respect.
But at another level, it creates the conditions for something else.
A world in which distinct religious boundaries are softened.
A world in which spiritual systems are blended, harmonised, and made interchangeable.
A world in which local belief systems are elevated, standardised, and woven into a broader global narrative of shared meaning and identity.
Alongside this has come the increasing elevation of what are described as ways of knowing. These are not simply alternative cultural perspectives. In many cases, they are explicitly spiritual and religious frameworks — involving cosmology, sacred beings, ancestral presence, and metaphysical claims about the nature of reality.
Yet in education, public discourse, and institutional policy, these frameworks are often presented not as belief systems, but as equivalent — or even superior — forms of knowledge alongside science.
That shift matters.
Because once spiritual frameworks are reframed as knowledge systems, they are no longer treated as matters of belief open to acceptance or rejection. They are normalised, institutionalised, and taught as part of the intellectual landscape itself.
The boundary between religion and knowledge dissolves.
And when that happens, a deeper change takes place — not only in institutions, but in the habits of thought of those moving through them. A population accustomed to treating multiple, incompatible spiritual systems as equally valid ways of knowing is a population being prepared, consciously or not, for the acceptance of a broader, synthesised spiritual framework.
In that sense, syncretism is not just a theological development.
It becomes a psychological and cultural preparation for convergence.
Conclusion
This is why this is not just a seasonal curiosity, and not just a New Zealand dispute about Matariki.
It is a case study in how syncretism works.
A modern religion is marketed as ancient.
A narrow source is elevated into public authority.
Severe imagery is softened into beautiful art.
Spiritual systems are renamed as culture, heritage, and knowledge.
Thresholds, schools, churches, and public institutions are furnished with rival sacred symbolism.
And what begins as local accommodation becomes preparation for something wider.
That wider movement is not necessarily announced as a world religion or a world government in any formal sense. It comes clothed in softer language: shared values, one human family, mutual respect, convergence, inclusion, global cooperation. But the effect is the same. Distinct truth claims are weakened. Sacred boundaries are softened. Religions become increasingly interchangeable. Spiritual systems are harmonised rather than judged. Populations are trained to regard incompatible cosmologies as equally valid forms of knowledge and meaning.
That is how convergence advances.
Not by abolishing religion, but by blending religions.
Not by denying the sacred, but by managing many sacred systems within one moral and institutional framework.
Not unity of truth, but unity of accommodation.
Not one faith, but a synthesised spiritual order in which differences remain only so long as they no longer exclude one another.
In that sense, syncretism is not merely a local theological error. It is a cultural preparation for a one-world religious framework, and perhaps for the broader political order that such a framework would serve.
Same pattern. New land. New gods.
Judy Gill BSc, DipTchg, is a parent, former teacher, and a staunch advocate for secular education.
References
[1] National Liturgy Office, NZ Catholic Bishops Conference. “Matariki - unifies us as one human family.” 21 June 2022.
http://nlo.org.nz/news-and-events/media-releases/matariki-unifies-us-as-one-human-family/
[2] National Liturgy Office, NZ Catholic Bishops Conference. “Ma tātou katoa a Matariki - Matariki belongs to all of us.” 14 July 2023.
http://nlo.org.nz/news-and-events/media-releases/matariki-a-space-for-us-all/
[3] National Liturgy Office, NZ Catholic Bishops Conference. News and Events archive.
http://nlo.org.nz/news-and-events/
[4] National Liturgy Office, NZ Catholic Bishops Conference. “Welcoming Matariki in Prayer: A Catholic Prayer to Honour and Celebrate Matariki.”
http://nlo.org.nz/assets/A-Catholic-Ritual-Prayer-to-Honour-and-Celebrate-Matariki.pdf
[5] Te Papa. “The stars of Matariki.”
http://tepapa.govt.nz/discover-collections/read-watch-play/matariki-maori-new-year/what-and-who-matariki/stars-matariki
[6] Te Papa. “Activity: What are the domains of each of the stars?”
http://tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-educators/teaching-resources/matariki-akonga-nui-matariki-for-teachers/explore/teaching
[7] Matamua, Rangi. Matariki: The Star of the Year. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2017.
[8] Arnold, Naomi. “The inheritance.” New Zealand Geographic.
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-inheritance/
[9] Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. “St Joseph’s Church (Catholic).”
https://www.heritage.org.nz/list-details/161/St%20Joseph%27s%20Church%20%28Catholic%29
[10] Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Constantine I: Legacy.”
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Constantine-I-Roman-emperor/Legacy
[11] Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Edict of Milan.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Edict-of-Milan
[12] Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Theodosius I.” https://www.britannica.com/summary/Theodosius-I
https://www.britannica.com/place/Rome/Campus-Martius
2 comments:
This syncretism is a theological step forward for the Maoris and is in opposition to the stance taken by, for example, Hirini Mead and Ani Mikaere who are trying to regress Maoris to the pantheistic mythology of their Presocratic past.
I don't mean to make a definitive judgement, but I just suggest not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Syncretism has been around for millennia. I became interested in it in PNG and did a bit of research on it which was published by the Melanesian Institute 35 years ago.
Tribal peoples recognise the existence of the gods of other tribes. If another tribe is technologically or militarily superior, they often start paying homage to that tribe's god(s). This does not mean that they abandon their own; they curry favour with the other one but continue to appease their own as well.
When Europeans arrived in comparatively backward parts of the world, many/most of the people there wisely decided (according to their logic) that it would pay to get the European god on side. We read about entire villages or even tribes 'converting' to the religion of the European conquerors but when en masse this was more a political move to butter up the conqueror than anything else. Missionaries taught then Middle Eastern lore which they harboured in their conceptual ecologies alongside their own aetiological and other myths. The end result is a mish-mash of indigenous and introduced ideas. These sometimes/often clash. An interesting coping mechanism is that of conceptual dualism which involves applying one mindset or the other depending on context. For instance, an illness may be attributed to sorcery or evil spirits (indigenous mindset) or a punishment from an introduced deity. (Or, if the person is educated, a result of infection by pathogens - in my own work I drew attention to science as a third source of competing ideas.)
Most syncretism over many centuries has arisen spontaneously but here we are looking at an engineered form of it. Good idea/bad idea? Very politically correct, for sure, but won't it sow confusion where clarity is the aim? "A world in which local belief systems are elevated, standardised, and woven into a broader global narrative of shared meaning and identity" sounds awfully abstract to me - the kind of idea well-informed intellectuals delight in but hardly for mass consumption. I hope some serious independent research goes into this development - it will be academically interesting if nothing else!
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