By Lynn F. Monahan / photos by Sean Sprague

Hong Kong ministries continue China tradition of pioneer Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers

Hong Kong has always been Maryknoll's gateway to China, and it was through that port city that the first four of its U.S. Catholic missioners entered the country in 1918.

While the city was just that, a gateway and rest stop, for Maryknoll's first three decades in Asia, Hong Kong became a mission site itself after foreign missionaries were expelled from China under Communist rule in the early 1950s. Even as Maryknoll shifted its focus to missions in Africa, Latin America and other parts of Asia, its "China hands" found plenty of need for their ministries as hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees poured into the then-British enclave on the South China Sea. Other Maryknollers with China experience went to Taiwan, where the routed Nationalist Chinese set up a rival government.

Today, Hong Kong, a prosperous international financial center, remains a key mission for Maryknoll, which carries out a variety of ministries there, especially education, pastoral work, migrant ministry and support for the local diocese.

"In Hong Kong, prosperity is everywhere—cars, office towers and luxury apartments. People come here from all over the world to build successful careers," says Maryknoll Father Michael Sloboda, who is associate pastor at St. Anne's Church in the Stanley section of Hong Kong. "Meanwhile, wages and living conditions are a heavy weight on the working poor: many restaurant workers, domestics and manual laborers. For them, life gets lived day-to-day. Domestic employees, mostly women from Indonesia and the Philippines, come here to support their families back home."

The missioner says his parish is a microcosm of life in Hong Kong. "Rich and poor, young and old come to us with their patchwork of languages, traditions and needs," he says. Many parishioners need counseling to cope with life in the fast-paced city. Gambling has ruined many families, and the city has a high suicide rate.

Father Michael Yeung, head of the Catholic charity Caritas Hong Kong, says the city's development as a financial center has created a one-sided economy, making life difficult for those in poverty, about 30 percent of the 7 million people. At the same time, once abundant manufacturing jobs went to mainland China for cheaper labor after the former British colony returned to Chinese control in 1997.

Under the arrangement returning Hong Kong to China, the city is governed as a Special Administrative Region within China, retaining autonomy in all matters except foreign policy and defense. A similar arrangement is in place for the nearby former Portuguese colony of Macau, where the Maryknoll Sisters continue to work.

Father Yeung, who oversees the largest Caritas operation in the world after Germany's, says the change from manufacturing to a service economy has meant a shift in fortunes for many. When mainland Chinese refugees first flooded Hong Kong in the early 1950s, "they were coming with absolutely nothing," he says. "Now the people coming down from the mainland are the new rich people."

At the same time, Hong Kong's middle and upper classes have grown accustomed to imported domestic help, so that jobs as maids or nannies are unavailable to the poor, Father Yeung says.

Hong Kong Bishop John Tong says 90 percent of the 120,000 Filipino domestic workers in the city are Catholic. About a quarter of Hong Kong's 473,000 Catholics are non-Chinese. Consequently, he says, two-thirds of the city's 51 parishes offer at least one English-language Mass on Sundays for non-Chinese Catholics.

Maryknoll Father Ronald Saucci notes that at St. Joseph's parish in central Hong Kong most parishioners are Filipino domestic workers. "We pack in as many as 1,200 people for each Mass," he says, adding that although they are paid minimum wage, the immigrant congregants have made the parish the richest in donations in Hong Kong.

Father Sloboda says the Filipino workers "come to Mass regularly and are active in parish life. Very often, these women are the first to offer whatever hospitality they can when the parish holds an event or celebration."

Immigrant parishioners suffer because of the separation from their families back home, especially mothers who, because they need to work, had to leave their own children behind. "You can see the sadness in their eyes," he says. "But their Catholic faith is a source of strength."

Bishop Tong says one of his top four priorities—along with evangelization, vocations and concern for the Church in mainland China—is taking care of the non-Chinese Catholics in the city. He quotes Pope Benedict XVI, saying, "There are no foreigners in the Church. Therefore we should treat them as brothers and sisters in the same family."

The bishop says his own vocation was inspired by the early Maryknoll missioners to China, and he was baptized at age 6 by the late Maryknoll Father Bernard Meyer. As a boy in Canton (now Guangzhou), China, during the civil war between the Nationalist forces and the Communists, Bishop Tong witnessed the Maryknoll missioners in action.

"Many refugees and wounded soldiers came down from the north to the south and every day I was very impressed by the good-hearted activities, charitable actions, offered by Father Meyer," the prelate says. So impressed was the young John Tong by Father Meyer's "Christ-like heart" that he asked his parents if he could enter the seminary.

Today, Bishop Tong still relies on the Maryknoll priests, and other missionary priests, noting that only half the 300 priests in his Hong Kong Diocese are Chinese. With the city only 5 percent Catholic, evangelization is his "first dream" as bishop, he says.

Currently about a dozen Maryknoll priests and two Brothers serve the Hong Kong Diocese as missioners, as pastors and assistant pastors, as school directors, teachers, researchers, editors, translators and one artist—Brother Sebastian Schwartz.

More than a half dozen Maryknoll priests also work in mainland China. As English teachers, they are prohibited from evangelizing, but they offer Christian witness by their lives.

More than a dozen Maryknoll Sisters are among 500, mostly Chinese, religious Sisters in the city. The Maryknoll Sisters are involved in Catholic schools, including founding the prestigious Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon, as well as nursing, parish work, migrant ministry, catechetics, social work and community outreach. Four Maryknoll Sisters work in Macau.

"One thing I have learned from living in China is the country's reverence for its ancestors—a reminder of our Communion of Saints," says Father Sloboda. "Here, I am keenly aware of my connection with all the faithful who have gone before me, and I celebrate the promise of joining them one day in God's holy presence."