Volume 24 No. 3 | Spring 2014
6
Titjikala celebrates first
Catholic baptism as
community embraces
pastoral outreach
Titjikla is an Aboriginal community of just over 200
people, situated on a red plain, about 100km south-west
of Santa Teresa in the desert country of Central Australia.
Most of the people who live there belong to the Lutheran
church, but recently the small Catholic population of
Titjikala had cause for great joy when Fr Bosco Son SVD
baptised baby Trishelle Kitson in the first Catholic baptism
ever held in Titjikala.
Fr Jim Knight SVD, District Superior of the Central Australia
region and historian of the people of Central Australia, says
the people of Titjikala mostly identify as Lutheran today
because of 19th Century Lutheran missionaries.
“It is Lutheran because when the first Lutheran missionaries
made their way up the dry Fink River bed in the 1870s,
they made contact with some Luritja speaking people, the
descendants of whom now make up a large part of the
population of Titjikala,” he says.
“With only 200 members, Titjikala is still a polyglot
community, with its citizens speaking the Luritja, Arrernte,
Pitjantjatjara languages, as well as English.
“The Catholic community of Titjikala has evolved mainly
because women from Santa Teresa married Titjikala men,
where they subsequently settled and raised their families.”
Fr Jim says that over the years, the missionaries in Santa
Teresa debated whether to extend their pastoral services
to the Catholics in Titjikala, and when Fr Bosco became
the parish priest of Santa Teresa last year, that idea
became a reality.
Fr Bosco says that when he arrived at Santa Teresa, he
didn’t even know where Titjikala was. However, when he
overheard someone saying that this small community
belonged to the parish of Santa Teresa but had not had a
regular visit or sacramental ministry, he decided to act.
“I felt sorry for the Catholic people at Titjikala,” he says.
“So I visited them over a couple of months to get to know
them. I asked the faithful of the town whether they wanted
to have a monthly Mass or not. Their response was ‘YES’,
so I began.”
Fr Bosco says on other occasions, such as funerals,
he would attend services run by the Lutheran Church,
“because keeping relationship is one of the most important
things in our lives”.
He says his desire to visit and make the sacraments
available to the people of Titjikala is connected to his own
childhood experience in rural South Korea.
“I grew up in a small town which had a Catholic Church, but
it was an outstation. This meant there was no regular Mass
celebrated there, although it later became a parish in its
own right in 1988,” he says.
“Somehow I felt a longing for having Mass regularly when I
was young. I still remember that the faithful were so happy
when they attended Mass regularly. The Mass was a solemn
occasion whenever it was celebrated.
“Now, I can imagine the priest’s feelings when he saw the
people’s longing for the sacrament. What I’m doing at
Titjikala would be the same as I experienced when I was
young, except for one different thing – I am saying the
Mass.”
Fr Bosco says he works closely with Sophie, a health worker
at the clinic at Titjikala. She helps him organise the regular
Mass and visits the Catholic and non-Catholic families to let
them know that there is a Mass coming up.
“The majority of the people of Titjikala are Lutheran, but
some of them attend the Mass as well,” he says.
Fr Bosco says one of the delightful outcomes of his pastoral
outreach to Titjikala was the recent baptism of Trishelle
Kitson, who became the first baby to be baptised Catholic
in the small community.
He says that Fr Jim had been scheduled to carry out the
baptism, but in the end, a previous commitment prevented
him from doing so, meaning the privilege fell to Fr Bosco.
“On the day of the baptism I arrived at the community
early in order to see Ansara, Trishelle’s mother, to talk
to her about the significance of the sacrament and her
