Continental Religion Returns: Antarctica
Faith in Diversity returns! The season of Lent was incredibly busy for me, as I taught Sunday School on Zoom, preached, and taught Bible Study at 3 different churches each Sunday. Having finished that sprint, I am finding time to return and finish this series on Continental Religion. First, to the South, and the ice...
There is an oral legend among the Maori people of the Polynesian south Pacific Ocean going back 1300 years of finding a mysterious mountainous land, surrounded by icebergs: “a foggy, misty and dark place not seen by the sun…completely bare and without vegetation on them.” While legends do not always equal history, the prodigious skill of Polynesian sailors and the massive distances they covered with the simplest boats suggests they could have arrived in Antarctic waters over 1000 years before Europeans claimed to discover the southernmost continent.
Nevertheless, more permanent settlement did not occur until after a Russian expedition sited Antarctica in 1820. And with humans came what tends to come with them everywhere they move - religion. While the other continents can claim at tens of thousands of years of myth and ritual, the ice continent was late to the party. In fact, just last year, in 2025, the Islamic call to prayer, the Adhan, was heard for the first time, from Bellingshausen Station on King George Station.
This week, Jews around the world are celebrating Passover. I cannot attest as to whether there will be a Seder in Antarctica this year, but there was one 30 years ago, in 1996. David Hornstein, an Australian Jew serving as a scientist for a New Zealander base, planned ahead for this holy observance which would happen in the deep winter. A fellow Jew at a nearby American base was unable to make it over, but 10 non-Jewish co-workers celebrated with Hornstein and the Navy Chaplain fulfilled his Interfaith charge by ensuring there was Kosher food. They even opened the door of the base to welcome Elijah, ice sheets blowing in along with him.
A small but sturdier Jewish congregation of seven found each other for the High Holidays in 2009, from Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year,t o Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, at the American McMurdo Station on Ross Island. This was the second year in a row of Jewish celebration but this one perhaps a tad more profound: “This was a much more intimate gathering than the station’s first-ever and very successful Chanukah party that she’d organized last year featuring a Station-made penguin menorah.” The author of this account, Kenneth Iserson, closed their Yom Kippur in a familiar way yet it such a foreign place:
“Then I, the eldest of our group, led our small congregation in what I have always thought of as the centerpiece of the holiday: “Al Chait she'chatanu lifanecha . . .” [For the sins that we have sinned before You . . .]. As our small service ended, we went our separate ways into the frigid evening, having celebrated our most sacred holiday, Yom Kippur, in a manner and place of which our ancestors never dreamed.”
Due to European exploration, Christianity has the longest recent history on Antarctica. But even this history is less than a century old. The first Catholic Mass was held at an Argentine base in 1946. The U.S.’s Chapel of the Snow was first built in 1956 but burnt down in 1978 and was not rebuilt until 1989. That makes the oldest church in Antarctica the Chapel of St. Francis of Assisi, built in 1976, which can claim the first known wedding ceremony and baptism on the continent.
Read more about the churches of Antarctica: https://www.antarcticacruises.com/guide/antarctic-churches-and-religions
But perhaps the most beautiful sacred space built on the continent is Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows, which is carved into a permanent ice cave near the Belgrano II Base. It is the world’s southernmost permanent place of Catholic worship in the world.
Kelly Wise Valdes
Religion has gone to every continent on earth. Where next? To unexplored ocean deeps? To the reaches of the solar system and the expanse of interstellar space? Only time will tell, but I have little doubt when it comes to that. Where humans go, religion comes with them.
Thanks for reading! ~Matt