Tapu Misa: Sometimes even the staunch need more than faith alone

Maybe it's because I've been engaging in some serious lying around and navel-gazing over the past few weeks that I find myself drawn this week to the really big questions occupying the nation's attention.

NZ Idol, for example. Rosita is not a rellie (as far as I know) but we do share a fondness for taro and corned beef. That's not to say her win this week sent me to the cupboards in search of my aforementioned (but seldom consumed) favourite foods, as Sir Howard Morrison wrongly suggested in the weekend. Fond as I am of the old crooner (so shoot me), I have to say that the idea of Pacific Islanders eating themselves silly in Rosita's honour was just, well, silly.

If Rosita is a role model it's because she can sing, she's funny and warm, and is not afraid to put herself on the line or laugh at herself - characteristics that wouldn't hurt a lot of other people.

Imagine if politicians were funny, warm, and able to laugh at themselves. Would we have had this strange marriage of convenience between Helen, Jim, Peter and Winston?

Apparently they've promised to love, honour and obey, but only when it suits them. And they'll continue to keep separate houses, be free to criticise each other when they want to, and only really get together to talk about the children.

On second thoughts, maybe it's not such an unusual arrangement after all.

I don't usually get teary-eyed at weddings but this week's "arrangements" leave me feeling like a parent watching her only daughter run off with the bad boy of the neighbourhood. At times like this, all you can do is watch and hope - and write this column, when what I should be doing is paying my respects to the great Reverend Leuatea Iusitini Sio, who died last week at the age of 80.

Sio landed in Auckland in 1951, intending to qualify as a teacher, but he was persuaded to change course and become a minister, such were the needs of Pacific Island immigrants back then. He became a stalwart of the Pacific Island Church in Newton, but his influence spread much wider.

He was that rare thing - a great leader and a revered father-figure who was universally loved and respected. He had humour, humility, warmth, intelligence, charisma.

I have never forgotten, although it was a quarter of a century ago, that he was the chairman of a trust that turned me down when I applied for a scholarship to study journalism. He told me I would do fine on my own, that others needed the money more.

It wasn't about money, which I didn't have. He knew that others would help me, and he was right.

Leuatea seemed to know implicitly that a truly great minister had to do more than offer spiritual guidance - he also had to deal with the practical challenges confronting his flock.

He had to get his hands dirty. If that meant crawling under Ponsonby villas to check the foundations of houses his parishioners wanted to buy, or turning up at the airport to make sure new arrivals from the islands had a place to go, then he did it.

He loved people, understood them. And I feel sure that he would have been as mystified as I by Dr Joseph Hassan, the Nelson GP who is refusing to prescribe contraceptives because it goes against his religious beliefs as a Catholic.

According to the good doctor - and he really does look a decent, well-meaning sort of man - fertility is "a gift to be looked after and not something to be medicated for like a disease".

I could understand Dr Hassan having a problem with abortion. Who doesn't in their heart of hearts? Certainly not most of the women forced into that situation by sad circumstance, as studies have shown.

But contraception? The pill? How nice to have the luxury of following one's beliefs to the exclusion of others' needs and realities.

Dr Hassan is not the first to take this stand. Pharmacists in several American states have refused to fill prescriptions for contraceptives on the grounds of religious belief. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed earlier this year, their stance has been backed by a nationwide trend in the United States towards "conscience" or "refusal legislation", allowing doctors and other health providers to "deny virtually any procedure to any patient".

By which we mean contraception and abortion.

I wonder if Dr Hassan realises that his stand on the pill may increase the risk of women having to resort to the more damaging and most widely used contraceptive of all, abortion.I doubt it. Dr Hassan, like his conservative spiritual leader Pope Benedict XVI, can afford to be pure of heart and morally upright in his attitude to the pill, condoms and abortion because he has never been confronted with the awful choice that a woman with no money or support has to make when she finds herself pregnant.

I guess that's why it's usually the grassroots Catholics - those who've seen first-hand the hardship and suffering caused in Africa and Latin America by uncontrolled fertility and the rampant spread of HIV through unprotected sex - who tend to ignore the prohibitions of the Vatican against condoms, contraception and abortion.

People come before doctrine, Reverend Sio would have said. Sometimes you need more than faith to get you by.