Pope’s Trip to South Korea, Church Envisions Growth

Myeongdong Cathedral, the center of South Korean Catholicism, was a magnet for the country’s downtrodden for decades.

Aug 13, 2014

Workers in Seoul assembled a stage for Pope Francis in advance of his visit to South Korea this week. He is to attend a gathering of Catholic youth. Credit Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

SEOUL: Myeongdong Cathedral, the center of South Korean Catholicism, was a magnet for the country’s downtrodden for decades. Pro-democracy fugitives found asylum inside the red brick church in the center of Seoul during the darkest years of military dictatorship in the 1980s, and parents who lost their children to government torture sought solace there.

Today, the activists and their slogans are long gone. As dusk fell on a recent evening, the church was shrouded in quiet, away from the lights and bustle of the large surrounding shopping and hotel district. Unlike the red neon crosses of the country’s more popular Protestant churches, the cathedral’s cross was barely visible in the night sky.

But the Catholic role in sheltering those who moved the country toward democracy has not been forgotten. And that history, experts say, could give Pope Francis an important opening during his visit to South Korea starting Thursday — his first trip as pontiff to the Far East, which is viewed as vital to the church’s future because much of its growth is outside traditionally Christian Europe.

For the Argentine Francis, who was chosen to lead the world’s Catholics in part because of his allure for people in South America, a stronghold of the faith, South Korea presents an important test of whether his popularity there and in the United States and parts of Europe transfers to Asia.

“From the vantage of the global demographics of Roman Catholicism, the pope’s presence is a powerful symbol of the Vatican’s recognition that it is in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that the church is growing most prominently,” said Lionel Jensen, an expert on religion in Asia at the University of Notre Dame.

The Vatican is especially interested in populous China, where an underground church loyal to the pope often suffers persecution from the government and competes with an officially recognized Catholic church beholden to the Communist Party. China and the Vatican do not share formal diplomatic recognition, however, and the Vatican did not mention outreach to Chinese citizens as an official goal.

But Vatican watchers say the pope is hoping that by traveling nearby, he will attract more attention among Chinese people curious about Catholicism. The Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, editor in chief of AsiaNews, a missionary news service with close links to the Vatican, said that through his trip to South Korea, Francis meant to show China that the “church is free and can contribute to the development of a country of a Confucian tradition.”

Father Cervellera added: “He wants to show China that there is no need to fear the Catholic Church.”

The Vatican says the last papal trip to the region was in 1999, when Pope John Paul II visited New Delhi. Francis, who was installed last year, has made two international trips, the first to Brazil, where he attended an international gathering of young Catholics, and the second to Israel and Jordan.

To emphasize its increased focus on Asia, the Vatican has announced that the pope will travel early next year to the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Paolo Affatato, the director of a news agency with a Vatican office dedicated to spreading the faith, said that with its vast youth population, “Asia was the frontier of evangelization.” Part of the impetus for the pope’s trip to South Korea was to attend Asian Youth Day, a meeting of young Asian Catholics.

South Korea is considered possible fertile ground for the pope, who has won accolades elsewhere for his humility and focus on the poor.

The number of Catholics in South Korea grew from 1.86 million in 1985 to 5.14 million, nearly 11 percent of the total population, in 2005, the last year when a census on religious affiliation took place.

Experts noted that John Paul’s two visits, in 1984 and 1989, helped spur Catholic growth in South Korea, where a majority of Christians remain Protestant, many of them Presbyterian. The number of Protestants, after years of exponential growth, peaked at 8.76 million in 1995, slipping to 8.61 million in 2005.

The experts also suggested that Protestant congregations might be vulnerable to conversions.

While the Catholic Church has been flexible in embracing Koreans’ centuries-old Confucian-based rituals of worshiping ancestors, a widely cited survey by the Christian Ethics Movement of Korea last year found Koreans complaining about Protestant churches’ “exclusive attitude toward other faiths.” A leading Protestant preacher in recent years outraged people by declaring from the pulpit: “Buddhist monks are wasting their time. They should convert to Jesus.”

People have also watched some of South Korea’s Protestant megachurches — among the largest in the world — degenerating into internal squabbling as pastors attempted to bequeath their churches to their sons, triggering factional strife.

Kim Yoon-jeong, 38, a homemaker in Seoul, is one of the disenchanted. Born into a Catholic family, Ms. Kim said that during her 20s she grew “bored with rituals and formality” in her church and transferred to a “more dynamic” Presbyterian church. But she has now switched back because of disillusionment with Protestant churches.

“They act just like chaebol,” Ms. Kim said, referring to South Korea’s family-controlled business conglomerates in which father-to-son transfers of wealth are the norm. “At least, you don’t have such a problem with Catholic priests with no children to inherit churches.”

Ahead of Francis’ visit, new books on the pope in Korean have crowded bookstore shelves, and coins and postage stamps to celebrate his visit have been issued. The government of President Park Geun-hye, who was baptized as “Juliana” at a Catholic church but officially says she has no religion, plans a grand welcome.

It has planned to close traffic on Gwanghwamun Boulevard, the hub of South Korean political and cultural life, when Francis leads a beatification ceremony there. Francis’ appearance on the fabled street — surrounded by foreign embassies, museums and statues of Korea’s most beloved national heroes — would set a milestone for Korean Catholics and Christians in general, whose origins were marked by bloody persecutions.

Catholicism began taking root here more than two centuries ago, when Koreans studied imported books on the religion. The Joseon Dynasty saw Christianity as a subversive influence, and an estimated 10,000 Christians were beheaded, drowned, buried alive or tortured to death. During his five-day trip, Francis is scheduled to visit sites of those killings.

Today, Protestants and Catholics together make up nearly 30 percent of the South Korean population, and the churches are often credited with helping push forward the country’s modernization. But the South Korea that the pope will see this week is vastly different from the country that John Paul II visited more than two decades ago.

After emerging from military dictatorship and building one of the world’s strongest economies, Koreans now fret over growing gaps between rich and poor. Some here hope that the pope’s visit will address a growing complaint among South Koreans that Christian churches are losing touch with the poor as wealthier people populate their pews.

Francis planned to visit a center for the disabled, and organizers of the trip invited laid-off workers to a special mass at the Myeongdong Cathedral.

Also eagerly awaiting his arrival are the parents of many teenage victims of a ferry that sank in April. No matter their religion, the parents, who call the government investigation of the tragedy a whitewash, hope that the pope’s attention to their plight will help persuade the government to arrange an independent inquiry.

“We are desperate,” Kim Young-oh, who lost a child to the ferry disaster and has been on a hunger strike for a month, said in a television interview. “So I am holding on until the pope comes.”--The New York Times

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