[Column] Who is a false prophet?

Posted on : The Hankyoreh Newspaper (Feb.1,2014 07:20 KST)

Archdiocese of Seoul criticizing some priests’ acts to assist the poor and seek inter-Korean reconciliation

By Bosco SEONG Youm,

former South Korean ambassador to the Holy See

A heated war of words is under way over a recently opened memorial hall for Ahn Jung-geun in Harbin, China. On one side is the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary, who described Ahn as a “terrorist sentenced to death for killing Japan’s first Prime Minister.” On the other is the South Korean Foreign Ministry, which calls him a “great man who gave his life for this country’s independence and true peace in East Asia.” When Ahn, a Korean independence activist, fatally shot Hirobumi Ito at Harbin Station on Oct. 26, 1909, an English-language newspaper in Kyungsung (the name Seoul went by back then) reported it as a “heroic act by the Catholic Ahn Eung-chil.” Bishop Mutel of the Chosun apostolic vicariate (today’s Archdiocese of Seoul) protested, saying Ahn was not a Catholic. When it emerged that Ahn had the baptismal name of Thomas, Mutel responded that he was a lapsed Catholic, a “figure outside the church.” It then emerged that Ahn was a devout believer who served as an altar boy under Father Wilhelm, and when he sent his two younger siblings to the bishop with a message that he wanted to confess before being executed, Mutel forbade the sacrament to be given. Wilhelm still went to the jail, and Ahn was able to confess before giving his life for his country - as a Catholic. The Archdiocese of Seoul ultimately expelled Wilhelm from Korea.

Since its founding in 1974, the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice (CPAJ) has been a touchstone of faith for Korean Catholics. Clerics and congregants alike cannot hide their feelings - they lay everything bare before it. The forty-nine so-called “venerable priests” who put out an advertisement the week of then-President Park Chung-hee’s assassination in 1979, demanding that bishops take disciplinary action against the CPAJ, went down in history as the “save-the-nation association of priests.” During the 1990s, conservative officials and papal ambassadors from the Vatican kept admonishing the college of bishops to do something about CPAJ. The bishops feigned ignorance, anxious to avoid a repeat of the treatment accorded to Thomas Ahn Jung-geun.

This time around, though, former and current Archdiocese of Seoul bishops have been joining in the free-for-all against the CPAJ, with the administration drafting the President and news media into a campaign to attack it based on remarks made about the Northern Limit Line in the West (Yellow) Sea by one priest during a special cathedral mass. First, there was Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, the Archbishop of Seoul, declaring during a Nov. 24 mass at Myeongdong Cathedral that it was “wrong for priests to participate in politics” and that “interfering with the political structure or social organization is not the priest‘s job.” It was the very same day that Pope Francis, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2013, declared in paragraph 182 of his “Joy of the Gospel” that pastors “have the right to offer opinions on all that affects people’s lives” and that Christian conversion “demands reviewing especially those areas and aspects of life ’related to the social order and the pursuit of the common good.‘” Yeom took this, the first message from a sitting Pope, and turned it into so much scrap paper.

Judging from how much energy South Korea’s conservative media put into publicizing the remarks of a single Catholic archbishop that week, it was clear that Yeom’s politicized pretense of “religious neutrality in politics” was just the gospel the establishment had been waiting for. Certain members of the faith, confusing the church for a “bulwark of anti-Communism” instead of a “bulwark of human rights,” seemed to draw their inspiration from Yeom. Some staged demonstrations in front of churches with picket signs reading “Pro-NK Priests, Go to North Korea” and “Down with the Pro-North Bishops.” Others screamed and kicked down cathedral doors or barged into masses when the sermons weren’t to their liking.

Perhaps upset that things seemed to be cooling down, a former bishop with the Archdiocese of Seoul stirred the pot again with a Jan. 15 interview. He was an older figure, not the sort the news media typically pays attention to. Yet here was the Joong-Ang Ilbo hyping it as an event: “An hour-long interview, his first since retiring in May 2012.” In reality, it quoted just 120 short words of his “statement.” Nicholas Cheong Jin-suk was ordained the “save-the-nation Cardinal,” with the article’s title stitched together from his text to read “Overly ambitious priests doing the wrong thing . . . are false prophets.” The newspapers that carried it, and conservative members of the flock, were left shuddering in yet another “religious orgasm.” The scriptural basis he cited was the Exodus from Egypt and Israel’s delivery by Moses.

Pope Francis also quotes the Book of Exodus and the story of Moses from the Old Testament in paragraphs 20 and 87 of his “Joy of the Gospel” - a kind of “white paper” for his papacy. The section he refers to is the one where the Lord says, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out. . . . I am sending you [Moses] to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

The Pope writes, “Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor.” The church, he says, must go out into society. In paragraph 97, he lists three standards for judging the truth of prophecies within the church: “making the Church constantly go out from herself,” “keeping her mission focused on Jesus Christ, and her commitment to the poor,” and “following the path of the cross, serving Jesus Christ as the center.” This raises some obvious questions for the leaders.

Pope John Paul II called for the easing of divisions and tensions between the Koreas for the sake of the peninsula’s prosperity. Pope Benedict XVI said a solution “should be sought with peaceful means and respecting the commitments taken by all parties involved, to attain the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and expressed “hope that the international community will continue and intensify humanitarian aid to the most vulnerable peoples, especially in North Korea.” And Pope Francis prayed for God to grant “the gift of reconciliation on the peninsula” and voiced his trust that “for the good of all the Korean people, the interested parties will tirelessly seek out points of agreement and possible solutions.” It is in line with these wishes that the CPAJ pointed out politicized abuses of the Northern Limit Line, part of an ongoing attempt to achieve reconciliation between North and South Korea. Meanwhile, Cardinal Cheong effectively thwarted voluntary aid to North Korea by Catholics and incapacitated the Archdiocese’s committee for reconciliation of the Korean people, and prohibited priests who visited Pyongyang from leading mass at Changchung Cathedral. Which side wears the mantle of “prophet” better?

On one side, we have priests and practitioners who embody the social doctrine that views the new evangelism of the 21st century as achieving justice by siding with the poor. For over a year, they have staged masses in the street to speak for the victims who died trying to protect their housing rights in the Yongsan tragedy and the workers at Ssangyong Motor, thirty of whom committed suicide to protest the unjust layoffs of thousands of employees. For years now, they have joined with the Bishop of Jeju to physically oppose the construction of a naval base and preserve it as an “island of peace.” On the other side, there was Archbishop of Seoul Nicholas Cheong Jin-suk, someone who closed his ears to the sobbing and screams of these residents and workers, someone who never once stepped forward as a mediator with government authorities, someone who responded to a 2010 emergency statement by the Catholic Bishops‘ Conference of Korea expressing concern that the Four Major Rivers Project could “do fatal damage to the natural environment throughout South Korea” by staging his own press conference to defend the project and stab the entire college of bishops in the back. Who has the more “prophet-like” attitude of the two?

Finally, there is the bloody cross that has been carried by the priests of the CPAJ, people who routinely endured wiretapping and arrests by public security authorities and a tireless slander campaign by government-controlled media for four decades, suffering countless episodes of detention, torture, and incarceration. It has been carried by the so-called “fringe priests” who were only ever assigned to remote churches. It has been carried by the priests who never stopped embracing the people branded as “Commies” by the establishment simply for dreaming of human rights and democracy in this country - the lepers of this society - and so strongly did the stench of leprosy permeate their clothes that they carried the label of the “pro-North clerisy.” And then there is the golden cross of the Cardinal, dangling down the front of his gaudy silk robes. Whose better resembles the cross carried by Jesus Christ?

Pope Francis, who has been lauded as the “father of the poor,” and the priests who practiced his teachings for forty years before he arrived - they are the men of God (another name for “prophets”). They are the ones who “must walk today, and tomorrow, and the day following, for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem” (Luke 13:33). But the other men of faith who follow far behind - they must heed the warning that “the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple” (Luke 11:50-51). Before this, the angry voice of Christ, they must make a fearful decision - without letting their true feelings show.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]