Now she's a priest she'll try to be good

'Elenoa Mancini, the daughter of a bishop, has never been one to toe the line. Picture / Brett Phibbs

When I phone 'Elenoa Mancini to ask whether she'd have time to do an interview she says, "Sure, darl".

And then she giggles because she is very amused at the idea of being interviewed.

She works in town, at the city council, and says she will take her lunch break early to make the time.

So we agree to meet at St Matthew-in-the-City because it is an Anglican church and Mancini was ordained last weekend as the first Anglican Tongan woman priest.

She comes trotting up the hill, wearing her dog collar and pin-striped trousers, a slip of a woman with a big personality and a big, irrepressible laugh.

Inside St Matthew, a film crew is setting up for a concert and the nave is full of cables and smoke generated from a machine and coloured lights.

She thinks that having her photograph taken in such a dramatic setting is a jolly good joke.

We sit in a pew, in the fug, and Mancini shows me pictures of her ordination. She is beaming in the photographs so it is obvious she had a lovely day.

"Oh yes," she says, "it was very nice food, eh! And lots of people. I think they were curious to be there. I had to bless them all afterwards."

She demonstrates how you do blessing people, over and over. It makes your wrists ache just watching. "I was so tired I was glad when it was all over."

She will be quite glad, too, when the attention is all over; like many who grew up in a large family, privacy is still a luxury. But she does know it is an important thing to have achieved such a role. "It's an open door. That means the choice is there, not only for Tongan women, but women in the Pacific. I think a symbol is there for anybody to look at."

Mancini grew up looking at, living with, a symbol of the church. Her dad was the first Tongan bishop so she had a "very, very strict" religious upbringing. She is child number eight in a family of 10 - "the cheeky one. I'm always like that - different from the family. You call it the black sheep."

She was supposed to behave like a bishop's daughter which meant "to be like a princess, to be at church all of the time, to behave well". After church her father would say, "'How was my sermon?' And the other sisters [would say], 'Wow, Dad!' I'd say, 'Will you next time make it short?' "

Although he was a tolerant man who "let us do what we wanted", the idea of a woman minister would have been a bit much for him, Mancini thinks. If her father had been alive to see her ordination, she says, "I think I'd kill him very fast because of the shock". As for her mum, "Oh my. She wished that someone in the family could become something in the church. "She did ask me: ''Elenoa, I really want somebody, like you, to become a nun'. And I said, 'A nun! I'm the wrong person. Ask my younger sister'."

How very kind of her. All of this makes her shriek with laughter all these years later.

She was supposed to stay at home to be a pampered miss. "Yes, I found that very boring." She went to work instead, as a secretary at the Tonga Chronicle.

She also managed to meet and marry an Italian Catholic film technician, Angelo. "If I marry a Tongan, I will be cooking all of the time; he will be in the living room. And I just couldn't stand it."

She has ended up in the kitchen, as it turns out, because "I don't want them [her family] to complain that I cannot do my work at home. I want to show a good example to my children". So she works full time, cooks, and is now a priest. "I am a hard-working person." But Angelo does the laundry - "he helps me so much" - and, anyway, she cooks what she likes: "Tongan food and the family don't like it!".

The family lived in Los Angeles for almost 20 years where she - this is one of the first things she tells me - took her three children to a party at Mel Gibson's house. And she met Kenny Rogers. Angelo, she says, "was not into that glamour life. I was! He couldn't believe me".

She didn't ever rebel against the church. Actually, you might say she rebelled into the church. And she managed this because she is made of sheer grit and not a little temper.

That she is now a priest has a lot to do, I put to her, with her getting good and mad.

She thinks that's about right. In the States she was about to be ordained. Then the family came to New Zealand.

It has taken another 10 years of "proving myself" to the church here. She is 58 next week and "it is very annoying because to me someone who's almost ordained and to come here to my own people ... And my own people still don't recognise that because of being a woman".

"I think it's just the way of the structure of the church."

What got her really mad, and made her even more determined, is the fact that in Tongan society "a woman has the highest status".

"If there's any special occasion in Tonga - weddings, 21st birthdays, a funeral - [the woman] is the one sitting up there telling people what to do. And they all run everywhere. But for me to go up to the altar where Jesus came for everybody no matter who you are ... I'm not allowed to go up there. That's what I can't understand."

She went to Tonga and noted again that there were no female ministers and said to herself: "I must work hard."

She did and she is very proud of her theology degree which, she says, is not a thing too many of the men have.

But otherwise, because she is a brand-new cleric, she is "very careful with what I say. " She prefers not to talk about the Civil Union Bill, for example, for the moment. And while she has real concerns about how giving cash to the church has, in Tongan culture, "become a show instead of being honest with your giving" this is a touchy subject to raise with parishioners. For now. You can't imagine that she will be a good quiet little priest for too long.

Of course she is, I tell her, a very powerful person and she giggles and agrees that "Oh, yes" she must have lots of pigs now. Such status symbols, she says, and the position Tongan priests hold within the culture, are nothing new to her. She knows the pitfalls.

She intends to keep working at the council in adminin the planning department because she is "up here in the church; and at the council I'm down there".

She put on her dog collar today because she was having her picture taken and took a bit of teasing from her colleagues. So she gave a bit back and told them: "You'd better be good when I'm around".

"And do you know, people have asked me: 'Will you behave now?' "

When I suggest that, as an Anglican priest, she wouldn't have any vices, she just about falls out of the pew laughing.

So I have a feeling people already know the answer.