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Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-fai is pictured at the pastoral center in San Francisco Dec. 13 during a Bay Area tour to greet Chinese Catholic communities. He commented on the dual existence of Catholics in China, caught between a state-sanctioned church and an underground church. (Photo by Dennis Callahan/Catholic San Francisco)
Dec. 16, 2019
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
During the upheaval caused by Hong Kong’s massive street protests over the past six months, “hatred has deepened every day” and dialogue has become very difficult to carry out, Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-fai said in an interview with Catholic San Francisco.
Archbishop Hon, 69, a Salesian and native of Hong Kong who currently serves as the apostolic nuncio to Greece, discussed the situation of Hong Kong and of the Chinese Catholic Church during a trip to the Bay Area. Archbishop Hon visited Chinese Catholic communities in the dioceses of Oakland and San Jose and the Archdiocese of San Francisco and gave two keynote addresses at the recent California Catholic Ministry Conference.
Archbishop Hon served as the secretary for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples from 2010 to 2017. He served two terms from 2004 to 2014 on the International Theological Commission, was provincial of the Salesian province of China and taught at Holy Spirit Seminary in Hong Kong. Archbishop Hon was sent in 2016 to be the Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese of Agaña, Guam, after its archbishop was accused of sexual assault.
Archbishop Hon said he was “very sad to see” how Hong Kong had become a more bitter and divided place over the course of the protest movement.
The protests, which gained worldwide notoriety in June, began over the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a bill that would allow Hong Kong citizens to be extradited to mainland China. Under the “one country, two systems” principle, Hong Kong directs its internal affairs independently of mainland China, maintaining a separate legal system, government, administration and economic policy.
Hong Kong has no extradition law with China. For many in Hong Kong, the attempt to pass one threatened to weaken the territory’s constitutional separation from the mainland and open citizens to prosecution by the mainland’s legal system.
“At the heart of the protest is the need for more confirmation of the one country, two systems policy,” Archbishop Hon said, noting that the confirmation is especially important in the election of the chief executive of Hong Kong and its legislature.
The extradition bill was “the last feather on the camel’s back,” he said.
While the dramatic protests, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, have captured the world’s attention over the past six months, Archbishop Hon pointed out that the territory has been wracked by regular protests for more than a decade: 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2016 all saw significant demonstrations, although none have been as large as this year’s.
Hong Kong society has been divided over supporting the protest movement, the archbishop said, and the Catholic Church there reflects those divisions. But as a community, he said, the church has always had “the tendency to stay with the poor and the needy.” In the current moment, he said, that means advocating for the dignity of the protesters.
Supporters of the Hong Kong government have called the protesters “troublemakers, rioters and even, unfortunately, cockroaches,” the archbishop said. “The protestors have their ideas and dignity and need to be treated well, as long as we work within the legal framework. If you don’t break the law, you have the right to say what you think, to do what you want.”
In a protest movement dominated by young people, families have also experienced divisions over the protests, Archbishop Hon said. Parents are shocked their children have become so involved in the demonstrations, and the “social upheaval” has led many parents to understand that while they do not have to change their political ideas, they need to show concern for their children and build “mutual understanding” and reconciliation.
Reconciliation, which the church tries to support, is desperately needed in Hong Kong, Archbishop Hon said, as the protest movement has deepened tensions and divisions in society.
In the last five months, “a kind of hatred, I’m talking about real hatred, one group against the other, has broken out,” he said. “It’s totally unnecessary, but because of acts of violence, hatred came out. I don’t think it can be solved easily in the next five years, the psychological attitude for hatred. We did not have it five months ago.”
Archbishop Hon also spoke about the Chinese government and how it relates to religions, especially to the Catholic Church. The reforms that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched in the late-1970s after the death of Mao Zedong are called “opening-up policy” in Chinese, Archbishop Hon said.
“When we talk about opening up, it’s only for the market, but not enough to guarantee basic human rights in the country,” Archbishop Hon said. “The power, the dominance of the party, that is untouchable.”
The archbishop continued that China has adopted Western market economics and lifestyles and given Westerners the erroneous impression of fundamental change.
“Reform is a pretext to keep, not to change, the political system,” he said.
The Communist government has also fostered indifference toward moral values, the archbishop added. “Deng Xiaoping said a cat, whether it's black or white, is a good cat as long as it catches mice – money,” he said. “So you don’t know where you are in society. This is a very high cost of many good Chinese people, they start losing the capacity to judge what is right and what is wrong.”
The Chinese government has three principles that govern how it treats any religion, Archbishop Hon said. First, religion will not be suppressed: individuals are free to believe in what they choose, although individual churches do not have any legal existence. Second, religions are to be governed by “patriotic associations” that guide them in collaborating with the state to build up socialist society. Finally, religious bodies and religious affairs must be free of foreign domination.
“The last one typically comes into play with Catholicism, because of the primacy of the pope over the church, including the appointment of bishops,” he said. Because only religious individuals exist legally, not churches, the state guides all practice of religion, making faith a de facto matter of domestic policy.
The Catholic Church has a dual existence in China as a state-sanctioned body and an underground organization because of China’s opening-up policy, Archbishop Hon said, which included opening churches for visiting Westerners. The government went to prisons and hard labor camps to find priests who could manage the state-sponsored Catholic churches.
“This group of people, with great hesitancy, came up and formed communities which are until now recognized by the government,” he said. “But in the meantime, there are also Catholics knowing that the patriotic association’s intent was to ruin the church,”
Some Catholics belong to the underground church because the official churches go against their “faith and conscience, while others say, well, we need to collaborate: as long as we don’t commit anything against doctrine, against the discipline of the church, then we can stay within the framework of the patriotic association. There are many good priests in both communities, and a number of priests are also very weak in both communities.”
Ultimately, the archbishop said, “I feel pity that Catholics should suffer from the ambiguities of faithfulness, not only to Christ but also to his vicar.”
The president of the state-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association recently made news for claiming that the state has supremacy over the Catholic Church. Bishop John Fang Xingyao of the Diocese of Linyi said at a meeting on religion in China that “Love for the homeland must be greater than the love for the Church and the law of the country is above canon law.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has heavily promoted subjecting religion to the Communist Party in recent years. In a 2016 speech at the National Religious Works Conference, President Xi demanded that religion be “Sinicized” and adhere to Chinese culture and Communist Party guidance.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the former bishop of Hong Kong, has been a vociferous critic of the Vatican’s approach to China and has accused it of “selling out the church” by signing the 2018 agreement on the appointment of bishops. In a Dec. 6 editorial in the Washington Post, Cardinal Zen wrote, “The line followed by the Vatican in recent years when dealing with the threatening China giant has been appeasement at any cost.”
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, has defended the 2018 agreement as a “starting point.” Last April, Cardinal Parolin told a group of journalists the Vatican signed the agreement "to advance religious freedom in the sense of finding (some) normalization for the Catholic community."
The cardinal added, "Our hope is that it will help, not limit, religious freedom. But we should be patient. I know that people want things immediately."