Catholic Online Forum

PNG's Catholic leaders are being urged to stamp out people's belief in sorcery following a brutal murder.

The Archbishop of Mt Hagen in Papua New Guinea is calling on the Catholic Church in the country's highlands to work harder to combat people's belief in sorcery.

Earlier, the city's police rescued two women who were in danger of being killed for alleged sorcery.

Their rescue comes days after a 20-year-old woman was doused in petrol and burnt alive on a crowded main street after being accused of using black magic to kill a young boy.

The resources-rich country is in the midst of a mining boom, but the wealth bypasses the vast majority. In their realities, some untouched by outside influence until only a couple of short-lived generations ago, enduring tradition widely resists the notion that natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a death. Rather, bad magic is the certain culprit.

“When people die, especially men, people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’, not ‘What’s behind it?’” says Dr Philip Gibbs, a longtime PNG resident, anthropologist, sorcery specialist and Catholic priest.

The concept of a serial-offending torture squad hunting down witches doesn’t fit the picture anthropologists have assembled of the customs that underwrite sorcery “pay-back” in parts of PNG. Attacks are, as a general rule, the spontaneous act of a grieving family, inspired often by vengeance, and sometimes by fear that evil magic will be exercised again. But experts also concede there are caveats to every rule in PNG. One of the most ethnically diverse landscapes in the world, PNG is endlessly confounding to outsiders, and even as modern explorers strive to pin down aspects of the old world, it changes before them.

ON FEBRUARY 7, Papua New Guineans woke to the headline “Burnt Alive!” and pictures of a large crowd, including school children, watching as flames engulfed the body of a young woman.

It happened in the busy, mercurial hub of Mount Hagen, smack in the heart of the country. A 20-year-old mother of two, Kepari Leniata, had been stripped, tortured, trussed, doused with petrol, thrown on a rubbish tip, covered with tyres and set alight.

The killing was reportedly carried out by relatives of a six-year-old boy who had just died in the local hospital. They seized a couple of women they suspected of causing the death, among them Leniata, and soon determined that she would be the scapegoat of their grief. Witnesses claimed the crowd blocked police officers and firefighters who tried to intervene.

Julie,

I'd agree that education is the answer. Certainly, the educated are less susceptible to the sin of superstition.

I'd venture that nearly every Catholic Sicilian woman until at least mid-twentieth century believed in the Evil Eye, my grandmother certainly did, or Irish who believe(d) in the "Little People". I can't even begin to imagine the number of Catholics who are wary of Friday the 13th, walking under ladders and similar superstitions and today we have a growing belief in ghosts and similar goblins.

I'd venture that nearly every Catholic Sicilian woman...

Did you miss the term "less" in James' comment?

Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Peter O'Neill says his government will repeal the country's controversial Sorcery Act.

The announcement comes after a spate of alleged sorcery killings in the Pacific nation this year.

The most recent was on the island of Bougainville, where an angry mob last week beheaded an elderly woman accused of practicing sorcery or black magic.

Researchers say the Sorcery Act legitimises such murders by making sorcery a legally recognised phenomenon and its practice a criminal offence.

Mr O'Neill says his government will repeal the law.

"To stop this nonsense about witchcraft and all the other sorceries that are really barbaric," he said.