Macao Journal
Published: December 26, 2007
By DONALD GREENLEES
The Rev. Lancelot Rodrigues can name just about everyone in the sparsely populated pews at St. Anthony’s Church on Sundays. Paul Hilton for the International Herald Tribune
MACAO — At morning Mass in St. Anthony’s Church on Sunday, Lancelot Rodrigues, an 84-year-old Roman Catholic priest, can name just about every member of the congregation in the sparsely populated pews listening to his sermon in Portuguese. He keeps the service short, to about 30 minutes. He knows from years of practice that brevity brings better crowds.
There are as many casinos as churches on Macao today. The New York Times
Even two days before Christmas, there were only a few dozen people to hear Father Rodrigues say they should open their hearts to Christ on his birthday. Nearly all those seated in the church have been coming for many decades; they are either middle-aged or as silver-haired as the priest.
“It is sad,” Father Rodrigues said. “The fervor of the people has now diminished.”
In Macao, the birthplace of Catholicism in China and East Asia, the ornate beauty of the centuries-old churches bears testament to its past. During the Ming Dynasty, Mateo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit and mathematician, became the first to carry Catholicism from Macao to Beijing, where he is buried.
But 450 years after the Portuguese established Europe’s first settlement here on the China coast, bringing missionaries who spread Christianity to China, Japan and Korea, Catholicism in the place the Portuguese called “City of the Name of God” is in crisis.
For the past 30 years, the number of Roman Catholics and their proportion of Macao’s population have been in steep decline, a stark contrast to the 45 percent increase in the number of Roman Catholics worldwide over the same period, according to the Holy See in Rome.
The church in Macao now counts only 18,122 adherents, less than half as many as 30 years ago, and the share of Macanese who call themselves Catholic has now fallen to less than 4 percent, compared with about 15 percent in the 1970s.
There are fewer baptisms. Priests complain that many Roman Catholics are not even married in the church anymore.
“It’s very rare for my friends to go to church,” said Jessica Marques, who at 27 was about the youngest person to come to Sunday Mass in St. Anthony’s. “I don’t think their parents go.”
The decline is also affecting the priesthood. The average age of a priest in the Macao Diocese is over 60. No priest has been ordained by the diocese in 15 years.
Still, the churches here are plentiful. There are 28 chapels and churches in the 11.5 square miles of this semiautonomous region of China, which was vacated by Portugal in 1999.
But Macao’s gambling-fueled economic boom has posed an unexpected challenge to the religion, as many Macanese chase quick riches in the glitzy casinos. Today there are as many casinos as churches, and unlike the churches, the casinos are full and quickly growing in number. The MGM Grand, the latest of many new huge gaming complexes, opened on the waterfront last week.
Father Rodrigues, a jovial priest who has a taste for an occasional fine glass of whiskey against doctor’s orders and admits to having made the odd wager himself in earlier days, said the casinos were both a blessing and a bane.
“In Macao, we were not prepared for this avalanche of money coming in,” he said, adding, “After all, the state and the casinos give us all the benefits we have here, and we forget about the religious benefits. The church, God, has been forgotten.”
Historically, Catholicism has occupied an uneasy place in China. It was suppressed during the Cultural Revolution. When restrictions were relaxed in 1976, the official Beijing-controlled church on the mainland had trouble accepting the notion that the Vatican should have the right to appoint bishops, although there have been recent signs of a thaw.
Rome, too, struggled to adapt to Chinese culture. In the 18th century, Augustinian and Jesuit priests were expelled from Macao in a dispute with the Vatican over the practice of allowing Chinese converts to Catholicism to maintain the tradition of ancestor worship.
Cheng Hing Wan, a researcher in religious philosophy at the University of Macao, said Buddhism and Taoism in Macao had remained strong, even as Catholicism declined. “They have a natural affinity with Chinese culture,” he said of these beliefs. “This is something the Catholic Church can never have.”
Yet elsewhere in China, the mainland church, while relatively small and kept under tight rein by the Communist government, has been flourishing. The size of the Beijing-authorized church is estimated at 7 million practitioners, but the underground church lifts that to at least 10 million, according to religion scholars.
Hong Kong has won converts, perhaps because of its high-profile cardinal, Joseph Zen, who has openly sided with the city’s democracy movement and marched in the streets in solidarity with democracy advocates. Dominic Yung, the director of social communication for the Hong Kong Diocese, said having a “very outspoken” cardinal undoubtedly helped recruitment.
Bishop José Lai of Macao, the second Chinese cleric to hold the post, is far more reticent about politics. A day before thousands of Macanese marched in protest this month over government inaction on democracy and corruption, Bishop Lai said in an interview, “I am not political.”
To find priests, Bishop Lai said he had taken to searching for recruits abroad, persuading four South Korean priests to fill the gaps of his aging clergy. Still, he added, “As a diocese, we have to get our own local priests.”
That is likely to remain a difficult goal. The rapid growth of Macao has given the young a dizzying array of leisure and work choices. The average casino job is lucrative enough to enjoy a spendthrift lifestyle.
The answer, some priests say, might come in emulating the promotional flair of the casinos. Father Rodrigues criticized priests for becoming too distant from the people they seek to serve.
“What we need here are priests with public relations attitudes, like the casinos,” he said.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment