University of Groningen
Belonging to a Global Family of God in Hong Kong
Westendorp, Mariske
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10.1080/1683478X.2017.1316815
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Westendorp, M. (2017). Belonging to a Global Family of God in Hong Kong: The Relevance of Religion in Facing an Uncertain Future. Asian Anthropology, 16(2), 116-132.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2017.1316815
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Belonging to a global family of God in Hong Kong:
the relevance of religion in facing an uncertain
future
Mariske Westendorp
To cite this article: Mariske Westendorp (2017) Belonging to a global family of God in Hong Kong: the relevance of religion in facing an uncertain future, Asian Anthropology, 16:2, 116-132, DOI: 10.1080/1683478X.2017.1316815
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2017.1316815
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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REPORT
Belonging to a global family of God in Hong Kong: the relevance of
religion in facing an uncertain future
Mariske Westendorp*
Department of Religious Studies, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, The Netherlands In descriptions of their religion, Hong Kong Catholics tend to emphasize the perceived universal character of the Catholic Church. In this report I explore this emphasis by analyzing what this characteristic means for my informants. I argue that the universality of Catholicism gives Hong Kong Catholics meaning in the world in which they live. As residents of the Hong Kong SAR and citizens of the PRC, “Hongkongers” are faced with an uncertain future. In this uncertain situation, they search for a stable anchor. The universal Catholic Church offers them this, by giving them a sense of belonging to a global family of God. This report thus presents a dif-ferent understanding of what it means to be a Hong Kong resident in today’s world. Keywords: Hong Kong; religious belonging; Hong Kong future; Catholicism; universal Catholic Church
Introduction
In March 2016, the British online newspaper the Independent published an article under the header:“With an identity caught between China and the West, Hong Kong is not at ease with itself– or its future” (Fisk2016). The article cites Anna Wu Hung Yuk, mem-ber of Hong Kong’s Executive Council, who grew up during Hong Kong’s colonial days. Wu describes herself and her fellow Hong Kong residents as experiencing an “identity crisis,” combined with a “suppressed sense of injustice.” While she was born “British,” she no longer has a right of abode in the United Kingdom (UK). Instead, she holds a passport for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) and is of fi-cially a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the 1997 Handover, her British nationality was replaced by a Chinese one. As a result, her dreams of Hong Kong one day being governed by a democratically chosen and representative Chief Executive and Executive Council have made way for fears of Chinese government influence and oppression.
The Independent article sums up the turmoil Hong Kong faces under the “one country, two systems” policy, especially concerning its future.1
Havingflourished under British rule from the mid- to late-twentieth century, Hong Kong is today struggling to find its place as an alienable but distinct part of socialist China. In this situation, aca-demics, journalists, writers, and “Hongkongers”2 are constantly “mincing words and splitting hairs” (Ng 2014, 185) to describe the unique identity of themselves and their city. The greatest emphasis in their descriptions is on the political identity of the city as a former colony of the UK and as a contemporary special administrative region within the PRC. This political identity is placed somewhere on the continuum between the
*Email:m.westendorp@ftr.ru.nl
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc-tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Vol. 16, No. 2, 116–132, https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2017.1316815
local (Hong Kong) and the national (China): a seemingly one-dimensional continuum of belonging.
Two trends can be detected in these political descriptions. First, there is a tendency to describe “the” Hong Kong identity as a single entity, encompassing all of Hong Kong’s distinctive features, its status as part of the PRC, and its position in Asia and the world; and second, there is a tendency to describe the identity in terms of what it is not: it was never British, just as now it is not and will never be Chinese (e.g. Xu Xi2008). But this political identity comes with a high level of uncertainty, especially regarding Hong Kong’s future. During the 1997 Handover, Hong Kong residents were promised that their “previous capitalist system and way of life” would remain “unchanged for 50 years” (Hong Kong Basic Law, Article 5). However, it is uncertain what actually is ensured with this promise, and what will happen once the period of 50 years ends.
This uncertainty affects how the identity of Hong Kong is often described in aca-demic and non-acaaca-demic sources. In descriptions, countless perspectives on the concept come into view, along with the multiple processes, fears, and hopes for the future of Hong Kong that underpin them. These processes come to the fore particularly in the narratives of individual Hong Kong residents.
This report examines some of these narratives. My aim is to provide a different understanding of what it means to be“Hongkonger,” and how this relates to aspirations of belonging. The individuals that I present express identifications which range from the local to the national and the global, and from the individual to the collective, often at the same time. This is especially the case in narratives of Hong Kong residents who describe themselves as Roman Catholic (henceforth: Catholic) and thus belonging to the Roman Catholic Church.3 They describe this Church as universal. They relate to this universal religious organization in their daily lives through the rituals they perform, through the ways they relate to non-Catholic Christian others, and in the values they ascribe to local church communities. Based on an exploration of these three aspects of their religion, I argue that belonging to the Catholic Church, and to the global family of God offers Hong Kong Catholics a strong sense of identification which transcends the local (Hong Kong) and the national (China). In other words, by identifying with the universal Church, they express a belonging to a system that goes beyond the political. Consequently, this offers them a means to escape the seemingly one-dimensional continuum of belonging described above.
Religion is often overlooked in research on Hong Kong (Formichi and O’Connor
2015). In the limited academic sources in which religion is mentioned, it is almost never related to questions of identification of Hong Kong-born residents. Instead, sources pri-marily describe “popular” religious practices (e.g. Baker 1979, 1980; Bosco 2015; Liu
2003; Savidge 1977) or religious practices and identities of migrants (Constable 1997,
2009; Mathews2000; O’Connor2012; Singh 2015). I regard this neglect of the role of religion as an academic void. For some Hong Kong residents, religion is an integral part of their identity. As a lived practice, it informs all aspects of their lives, both religious and non-religious. As such, it needs to be taken into account in studies on the future of Hong Kong.
Research on Christianity in Hong Kong variously focuses either on the growth of Christianity during the city’s colonial history (e.g. Smith [1985] 2005), on the Christian conversion of Hong Kong communities such as the Hakka in the New Territories (Constable 1994), on the question of how the religious policies of the PRC might influence Hong Kong Christian organizations in the future (Leung and Chan 2003), or on the Christian practices of migrant domestic workers in the city (Constable 1997;
Hawwa 2000; Nakonz and Shik 2009). Little has been written on how Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, shapes the worldviews of Hong Kong residents. I aim to fill this gap by focusing on Catholicism as experienced by these residents, with a particular focus on their aspiration to belong.
Despite its long presence in the city, Catholicism is still a minority religion in Hong Kong. The official history of the Hong Kong Catholic Church dates back to 1841, when thefirst Catholic missionaries came to the island to attend to the needs of Irish Catholic soldiers who were stationed in the city, and to provide accommodation, transport, and financial support for the mission in mainland China. It was only from the 1860s onward that the Church became interested in the Christianization of local Hong Kong people. Over the decades, despite its extensive evangelism, the growth of the Church remained slow (an exception being the years between 1946 and the 1970s, due to intense migra-tion from mainland China to Hong Kong) (Chu 2005; Criveller 2008; Ha 2007; Li, Cheung, and Chan 1998). At present, the percentage of Catholics in the city remains stable at about 5% (Stoker2013).
In contrast to the situation on the mainland, the Catholic Church in Hong Kong has had the opportunity to develop in an open and free political context. Ever since their first arrival in the city, Catholic and other Christian organizations set up social service centers for Hong Kong people, most notably schools. They did this in co-operation with the British colonial government (Chu 2005). After the 1997 Handover, they continued their role as social service providers. As of 2014, the Catholic Church was running 264 schools with over 165,000 students, 6 hospitals, and 13 clinics (Catholic Truth Society
2013, 667). The Catholic Church has also been involved in Hong Kong’s politics, espe-cially from the early 1980s onward (Leung 2001; Tsui1989). Political action is mainly organized through the Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese. To summarize, due to its extensive offer of social services and its vocal involvement in political issues, the Catholic Church today has a strong presence in the city of Hong Kong, despite its marginality as expressed in numbers of converts.
To describe the particularities of this religion in the city of Hong Kong and its rela-tion to the quesrela-tion of belonging, I structure this report as follows. First, I briefly pre-sent the methodology used in my research. I then analyze “Hong Kong identity” as described in academic and non-academic literature. These descriptions tend to focus on Hong Kong’s political identity, often neglecting the broad palette of cultural identifica-tions present in the city (Fung 2004). I then bring in my informants discussing identity. Their narratives show that the uncertainty surrounding the identity of Hong Kong in the near future has implications for their question of belonging.
I then analyze my Catholic informants’ descriptions of the Catholic Church as a uni-versal religious organization. Here I present the main thrust of my argument. In their descriptions of the Church, my informants emphasize the universal aspects of their faith, as expressed in rituals, especially in opposition to Protestantism and in relation to local church communities. The universality of their faith anchors their belonging not in the relation between Hong Kong and China, but in the world at large.
I expand on this argument by pointing out that through their religion, my informants craft a sense of self and a position in the world that transcends the actual place and time in which they live. This religious belonging offers them a firm status as citizens of a global organization, and as citizens of a global family of God. Hence, through their descriptions of active membership of the Catholic Church, my informants articulate what it means to live in their city, their nation, and in the world.
Methodology
This report is part of a larger PhD project conducted in Hong Kong between July 2012 and July 2013, and between March and September 2014. The focus of the research was to provide an ethnographic account of Buddhists and Catholics living in Hong Kong during a time of turbulence, i.e. the years leading up to the 2014 Umbrella Movement. During my research, I talked to over 90 Hong Kong Buddhist and Catholic laity and clerics, whose experiences and reflections I explored in some 120 interviews and addi-tional meetings.
During the first period of research, I selected two religious centers near Tsuen Wan (New Territories). One of these was a Catholic Church. Aided by helpful clerics and employees, I met many lay Catholics who in different ways were affiliated with the church; most of those presented in this report belong to this congregation. I visited this church as often as possible, and sometimes met my informants there. However, I did not focus solely on this community, but followed the people I met there to other places. This allowed me to embed my informants more firmly in the social context of the entire city, rather than in their neighborhood or religious community. In this way, I experi-enced how they incorporate their religious beliefs into their everyday lives and into their reflections on non-religious topics. Moreover, when meeting informants, I soon learned that although they frequently attend Mass at the same religious sites and belong to specific Catholic communities, they do not feel restricted by these (see also Westendorp
2017). They often travel to different places in Hong Kong (and beyond) to attend Mass or participate in other activities. They claim it is of little concern which specific Catholic church they attend, as all churches are part of the same universal Catholic organization.
My participants were drawn from a wide range of backgrounds (e.g. gender, rela-tionship status, age, relations and attitudes to mainland China, jobs, and incomes). A common denominator is that they all belong to what could be described as Hong Kong’s middle class. The Hong Kong middle class features prominently in academic and journalistic writing. It is often described as very large, with some academics indicat-ing that as of 2013,“more than 70% of Hongkongers consider themselves as belonging to the ‘middle strata’” (Lau 2013, 108). Nonetheless, given that there is no longer a manufacturing industry and that the working class is no longer purely“blue collar,” it is hard to define what the “middle class” in Hong Kong comprises exactly.
The Hong Kong middle class is a very diverse group; but despite this, members have a few characteristics in common. They have all finished their tertiary education, most of them in Hong Kong, but some abroad. As self-proclaimed members of the mid-dle class, they differentiate themselves from the upper class, whom they describe as the affluent Hong Kong residents who live in apartments in the Mid-Levels (Hong Kong Island). They also tend to differentiate themselves from those they see as the lower ranks of Hong Kong’s population, who live in areas such as Sham Shui Po (Kowloon), or areas deep in the New Territories. Finally, they aspire to be part of a professional class, and are those described as holding strong ideas about what it means to be Chinese and/or Hongkonger.
Members of the Hong Kong middle class are also the ones who seem most unhappy with contemporary political and socio-economic life in the city. One of the first times members of the middle class prominently displayed their dissatisfaction with Hong Kong’s politics was in 2003. On 1 July, over half a million Hong Kong residents (under the organization of the Civil Human Rights Front) marched from Victoria Park to the
Central Government Offices to demonstrate against the implementation of the Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23, which could lead to the loss of freedom of speech along with other freedoms. Surveys taken of the protesters that joined the March revealed a distinct profile: “They were predominantly young, educated, law-abiding, mainstream ‘Hong Kongers’ with middle-class backgrounds, jobs and aspirations” (Siu 2009, 56; emphasis added). The 2003 protests indicated the worry, uneasiness and anxiety felt by Hong Kong’s middle class residents regarding the future of their city (Lui 2014, 99). Since 2003, these residents have become more vocal. Lau Siu-kai argues that:
In essence, Hong Kong’s middle class has morphed from a self-confident and complacent social class into an anxious, impetuous and discontented social class since the Handover. … Undeniably, there is growing middle-class aspiration for political participation and politi-cal influence. They want to see changes in Hong Kong that will bring about equal opportu-nities, fairness and a government more responsive to their needs and interests (Lau 2013, 107, 114).
It is this group of discontented Hong Kong middle-class residents and their well-edu-cated children who have staged and participated in major protests over the past years, e.g. the demonstration against the proposed implementation of the Moral and National Education Program in 2012, and the 2014 Umbrella Movement. The people discussed in this report are members of this active and discontented middle class.
Unravelling the uncertain future of Hong Kong
The identity of Hong Kong and its middle class residents is often the focus of attention in debates about the city. Most scholars describe this identity as having been formed in the late 1960s, when a new generation of Hong Kong-born children reached adulthood (Mathews 2000). People of the earlier generation were mainly refugees from mainland China who fled to Hong Kong to escape the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), many of whom had hoped to one day return to their homeland. The generation of the 1960s, in contrast, came to regard Hong Kong as their home. They took pride in identifying them-selves as residents of the city, and in Hong Kong as an independent cultural and geo-graphical entity (Abbas [1992] 2012). As such, they considered themselves partly Chinese, but different than citizens living in the PRC, and Westernized but not Western like the colonial British (Baker1983; Fung2004).
In 1984 the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed. This declaration stipulated that Hong Kong would be returned to the PRC in 1997. A few years later, in 1989, the Tiananmen Square incident took place. These two incidents had a major impact on Hong Kong and its residents. The pride they took in their city became overshadowed by fear for the future (Abbas 1997). The imminent return of Hong Kong to the Chinese state, which did not shy away from using violence against its own citizens, threatened the developing idea of Hong Kong as a free and democratic home (Mathews, Ma, and Lui2008). In 1997, Hong Kong was returned to the PRC. From this year onward, Hong Kong residents were asked to assume a“Chinese” national identity, a status “that some embrace and others resist” (Mathews2000, 121).
Much has been written about the identity of Hong Kong and its future position within the PRC. Literature often alludes to this identity as being unstable at best, or on the verge of disappearance at worst. For example, poems written by Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan in the last decades of the previous century have been collected in a volume entitled City at the End of Time (Cheung2012). In 2008, Hong Kong writer Xu
Xi published a series of short stories under the telling title Evanescent Isles (Xu Xi
2008). In it, she writes that “we are once again more or less on our own, the way we were when a handful of fisher folk and farmers roamed these shores, more or less gov-erned by China” (Xu Xi 2008, 4); she questions where Hong Kong is heading. A much-quoted example from academic literature is Ackbar Abbas’ (1997) description of Hong Kong in the early 1990s as a“culture in a space of disappearance.”
Debates surrounding the identity and future of Hong Kong have also been taking place in the urban (political) environment of the city. Carolyn Cartier (2010) shows how in the first ten years after the 1997 Handover, Hong Kong was marked by artistic actions in public spaces, expressing concerns about identity formation and Hong Kong’s instability. There were likewise artistic aspects to the recent 2014 Umbrella Movement, the large-scale protests aimed at securing a safe, democratic space for Hong Kong within China’s borders (e.g. Lim 2014). Debates are also held in the political arena, often spurred by “nativists” fighting for Hong Kong’s core values. Recent events in Hong Kong attest to this: examples include the aforementioned 2003 protests against the implementation of Article 23, the 2012 protest against the implementation of the National Education Program, smaller-scale protests such as those aimed at a reduction in the numbers of mainlanders entering the city, and the 2016 Hong Kong Legislative Council oath-taking controversy. All these protests prominently displayed a wish to ensure Hong Kong’s core values, e.g. democracy, freedom, rule of law, and capitalism.
An answer as to how struggles over the identity of Hong Kong affect Hong Kong residents is often sought in literature through consensus surveys. These studies aim to map the identifications of Hong Kong residents; their overall tendency is to show that a decreasing number of residents attach value to their national identity as citizens of the PRC. For example, a survey undertaken by the Popular Opinion Programme of the Hong Kong University (HKUPOP) in 2014 shows that an increasing number identifies as“Hongkonger.” The political category “citizen of the PRC” is the least popular. Other categories of identification are, in order of popularity, “Asian,” “member of the Chinese race,” “global citizen,” and “Chinese”. The study indicates that a majority of Hong Kong people, while not denying their Chinese cultural background, nowadays resist their political identity as PRC citizens.
Other studies (e.g. Ma and Fung2007; Mathews, Ma, and Lui2008) show a slightly different picture, one in which different categories of identification have become diffuse, and overlap. They indicate that Hong Kong residents not only identify as“Hongkonger” or “Chinese,” but increasingly as “Chinese but also Hongkongese,” or “Hongkongese but also Chinese.” In these studies, the local and the national are not exclusive cate-gories, but different identifications that can exist at the same time. In the future of Hong Kong, identifications probably continue to shift between these categories. Many studies seem to situate Hong Kong identity somewhere between the local and the national. Researchers allude in this situation to an increase in nativism of Hong Kong residents (an emphasis on the local), or to the emergence of an ambiguous identity that combines different identifications (local and national), all in light of the imminent incorporation of the Hong Kong SAR into the PRC.
However, what is often lacking in these studies is a more elaborate understanding of how local Hong Kong residents experience this seeming contradiction between China and Hong Kong in their everyday life. Residents of Hong Kong officially live within the borders of the PRC and in some cases carry a Chinese passport. However, they are not subject to CCP strictures or laws. They are Chinese citizens, but residents of Hong Kong. As such, they have multiple identifications; the question is how to combine them,
now and in the future. How do they live their everyday lives in a city that is described as situated somewhere between the local and the national?
One of my informants is Wendy, a Catholic in her early 30s. Born in Hong Kong to two mainland Chinese parents, Wendy feels very strongly about her identity as a Hongkonger. Whenever she travels overseas, she tells people she is Hongkonger, not Chinese. Shefinds it important to emphasize this difference, as she does not want to be seen as a Chinese tourist. I had an appointment with Wendy in early August 2014, shortly after she had returned from her honeymoon in Italy and Switzerland. Over tea, she talked incessantly about the coarse behavior displayed by mainland Chinese tourists in the cities she had visited. She criticized them for being loud, for jumping queues, and for their poor personal hygiene, attributes she did not wish to be associated with.
Like Wendy, many Hong Kong residents strongly express the difference they per-ceive between themselves and the Chinese living in the mainland. According to Eva Spies, “in order to understand why and how actors relate different … views and prac-tices to each other, a researcher needs to pay close attention to the ‘contents’ of these differences from the actors’ points of view” (Spies2013, 119). Pursuant to Spies’
com-ment, I asked Wendy and other informants to explain how they distinguish themselves from their mainland Chinese counterparts. Most frequently repeated are the negative val-ues attributed to mainlanders. Mainlanders are regarded as backward and uneducated, people whose morals have been destroyed by the Cultural Revolution and the recent economic boom in the PRC. For many, this new prosperity has turned mainlanders into people for whom profit-making is more important than the quality of consumer prod-ucts, or than interpersonal relationships. In contrast, Hongkongers regard themselves as better educated, more cultured, and with higher moral values.
In line with this, many Hong Kong residents emphasize the uniqueness of their city, seeing it as different from other Chinese cities. They feel that their city is culturally dis-tinct from cities on the mainland, but nevertheless part of the same country. They are confident about the strength of Hong Kong and are proud to belong to such a global city. At the same time, some express a negative view regarding the city’s future, in line with what they see as an increase in the dependency of Hong Kong on China.
The degree to which Hong Kong residents define themselves as different from their mainland Chinese counterparts, and the descriptions of where they belong, are all con-structed individually, depending on a person’s status, job, political affiliation, even reli-gious orientation, and they shift through time. A good example is Albert, a Catholic in his late 50s. As a salesperson Albert frequently travels to the PRC. While there, he introduces himself as Chinese. Albert remarks: “The best identity is Hong Kong: we have the freedom to travel around the world and to China. But if you [as a salesperson in China] say you are from Hong Kong, nobody will care about you.” Hence, although Albert identifies as Hongkonger, when working on the mainland he prefers to introduce himself as Chinese to avoid friction with his Chinese colleagues.
Albert thus has to negotiate between being a Hong Kong resident and/or a citizen of the PRC. In various times and situations, he identifies himself as being a Hongkonger, as being Chinese, or (as I will indicate in the next section) as belonging to a global organization. Which part of his identification he emphasizes depends on his particular location, the people surrounding him, and his goals at that particular moment. What is interesting about Albert’s story is that these different identifications are not mutually exclusive. Instead, what it shows is a negotiation, sometimes a struggle, to define who he is and where he feels he belongs.
The narratives of Wendy and Albert differ in that, due to personal circumstances and experiences, Wendy more clearly expresses her belonging to Hong Kong, while Albert encompasses in his identity a belonging to both Hong Kong and the PRC. What the narratives have in common is an uncertainty regarding the future position of Hong Kong. The reality in which Hong Kong residents like Wendy and Albert live is one caught between their city and the larger nation. Once Hong Kong is fully returned to the PRC, what will be left of the unique status of the city and its residents?
Another feature that Wendy and Albert have in common is their expression of belonging to a global religious organization, i.e. the Catholic Church. Choosing to belong to this organization offers them another answer to the question of the future of their city and their position as its residents, one that transcends the geographical bound-aries of the Hong Kong SAR and the PRC. In the section below I elaborate on this by showing that where to belong to, especially in light of an uncertain future, relates to the possibility of other belongings, e.g. religious.
Catholic belongings
In mid-June 2013, I sat down with five Catholics of the church in Tsuen Wan for a group discussion, the purpose of which was to gain an understanding of how they per-ceive the position of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong and in their lives. One of the questions I asked was: “What does the Catholic Church mean to you?” Albert’s answer consisted of six points:
1. Attend Mass easily everywhere in Hong Kong; 2. A place for [Catholic] friends to stay together; 3. A place of praying to God all the time; 4. No matter where you are, you are always served by the Catholic [Church] because of [its] tradition; 5. All kinds of supporting services; 6. Part of the larger [Catholic] community.
On Albert’s list, three points describe the Catholic Church as a universal organization (i.e. points 1, 4 and 6).4
Because of its universalism, Albert feels it is possible to attend Catholic Masses anywhere in Hong Kong, and indeed the world, something he has experiencedfirst-hand thanks to his extensive traveling. The remaining points emphasize the importance attrib-uted to prayer, to a specific Catholic community or parish, to the networks present there, and to the services on offer (mostly services that help Albert deepen his faith, e.g. Bible readings, visits to other Hong Kong parishes, and visits to the sick and the elderly in hospitals and retirement homes).
Albert’s list is a good example of the way Hong Kong Catholics experience and describe the Catholic faith and the position of Catholicism in their lives. Central to their descriptions is the perceived universal character of the Catholic Church. “Universal” means, at its most basic level, the perception that Catholics all around the world preach and spread the same message, and that the Catholic faith is likewise practiced in similar ways globally, safe from local differences in, for example, language.
My informants regard themselves as part of this one universal Catholic network, which forms a global family under God and the Pope in different parts of the world and different times. For example, Sarah, a Catholic in her mid-20s, said:“The Catholic doc-trine is universal. The word ‘Catholic’ itself means universal. So we [Catholics all over the world] can all communicate with each other, and we can attend Catholic Mass everywhere without any problems.” Through the universal character of Catholicism,
Sarah feels connected to Catholic people elsewhere. While not all of my informants literally used the word “universal,” they all mentioned this connection as essential to their lived faith.
The perceived universalism of the Catholic Church is confirmed and expressed in at least three aspects of the religion, as highlighted by my informants. These three aspects are: the rituals, the relation between Catholicism and other non-Catholic Christian orga-nizations and expression (primarily Protestant), and their specific understandings of local Catholic communities within the universal Church. I will elaborate on these aspects below.
First, my informants feel connected to the global family of God through the rituals they perform. The order of the Catholic Mass is similar across the world; through bap-tism they become members of the same universal family; and the universal connection is continuously emphasized through the sharing of the same body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist. This connection is also emphasized in annual rituals, like the Pro-cession in Honour of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Fatima that is held each year on Cheung Chau Island (see Figure 1). Even though these practices all take place in local churches and are performed in local languages, they connect individual Catholics to the worldwide Catholic family.
The universality of Catholic rituals not only has a global, but also a historical dimension. Walter, a Catholic in his 60s, lives his Catholic faith in his daily life as follows:
Besides being a Sunday Catholic, I live my life in prayer. I have two periods of prayer each day: in the morning and in the evening. Early in the morning I practice taichi, followed by half an hour of meditation. It is called Christian meditation and it is promoted by Father John Main. He teaches us to recite the mantra“Maranatha” from the beginning to the end. It’s an Aramaic word, from a dialect spoken by Jesus at that time: you can find this word in some old versions of the Bible. Actually, this recitation wasn’t developed by John Main: it is a teaching from the early Desert Fathers. It is something that we forgot, and then in the past decades it has been promoted again. Before I go to sleep at night, I do another meditation following the Ignatius spirituality.… I also travel sometimes. A few years ago, we joined a tour to Turkey and Greece, to the roots of evangelization.
Through his practices, Walter reaches back to the beginnings of the Church, to the ori-gins as they were presumably laid down centuries ago. At the same time, he relates his practices to the worldwide Catholic community, in other countries and during different times. His practices thus transcend the particular place and time of his life.
The heavy emphasis placed on the universal character of Catholicism does not mean that my informants do not acknowledge or appreciate local diversity and particularities. Sarah mentioned that “Of course there are some Chinese things in the Church. I think that isfine. We are Hong Kong people, so we use our own culture in the way we serve God.” The universal Catholic Church is localized in the Hong Kong context in the ritu-als used to worship and serve God. This particularity of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong and its interaction with the universal religion is readily acknowledged and appre-ciated by a majority of my informants. For them, universalism makes these particulari-ties (such as the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese’s relative openness to the Chinese practice of ancestor worship and the celebration of the Chinese New Year) possible. Indeed, their narratives often suggest that it is precisely because of the universal character of Catholicism that adjustments can be made in the local Hong Kong context: for them, it is the localization in their specific context that strengthens the Church’s
universal character. The local and the universal thus do not contradict each other, but co-exist and even strengthen each other.
This might seem like a paradox. In Hong Kong, there are large differences between different churches and masses. Masses are said in various languages; church architecture expresses a range of styles; and Catholic leaders come from a wide variety of local and missionary orders. These differences are the result of the Hong Kong context, in which the Church needs to find ways to localize itself without losing sight of its universal character. This paradox of the localization of universalism stems from the global Catho-lic Church’s post-Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The aim of this Council was to modernize the Church by offering local church communities and leaders ways to inte-grate more effectively into the local contexts in which they found themselves. Catholic
Figure 1. Every spring, Catholics from all over Hong Kong travel to Cheung Chau Island to join in the procession in honour of the holy cross and our Lady of Fatima. The procession commemo-rates the Virgin Mary appearing to three shepherd children in Fátima (Portugal) in 1917. Photograph by author.
leaders and organizations were encouraged not to retreat, but to be more open to the world and its contemporary developments (Wedam 2000). As a consequence, they had to face the challenges of pluralism, modernity, and different forms of spirituality (Casa-nova1996; Linden2011) and use these to localize the global teachings of the Church.
The narratives of my informants allude to the success of these attempts in Hong Kong. For example, Albert asserted that:
There is a lot of treasure in the Catholic Church. Catholicism is not simple. It has a long tradition with many holy men. Because of this, it not only depends on the Bible, but also on 2000 years of experience.
He continued,“In Hong Kong, all the fathers are part of society. They are localized, but they still keep the tradition, because of their long history of experience. You can see that in the way they lead us.” The universality of the Catholic Church, according to Albert, is present not only in the scriptures, but also in the historical practice of the Church, and the ability of local Catholic leaders to vernacularize Catholicism’s univer-salism into the local context. He and other of my informants perform the rituals within the local context in ways that they understand to be appropriate and universal through time and space. They attend mass, pray, and join in the celebration of the Eucharist in ways that are similar, in their view, to how this is done everywhere in the world. Conse-quently, through their practices, they connect to the global Catholic Church.
The importance of being part of a universal community in the past, present, and worldwide is most prominently foregrounded when Hong Kong Catholics find them-selves confronted with Protestant Christians. One of the Masses I attended on a Sunday in January 2013 demonstrated this. It was the early morning Mass held in English. In his sermon, the Mexican priest shared with the predominantly female Filipino audience his dissatisfaction that some women attend a Catholic Mass in the morning and join their friends at a Protestant service in the afternoon. After the Mass, I asked one of my Hong Kong informants what he was referring to, and she answered:
He doesn’t want them to hear different things. Sometimes, they have different teachings in the Protestant church. In Protestant churches, the priest can interpret the Bible for himself, because there is not one leader. Then how can you know what is true?
While the Catholic Church is valued as a universal institution, Protestantism is seen as encompassing a multitude of different churches, streams, and teachings. It is described as unstructured, loose, and diverse. Because of this, my informants question the truthful-ness of the Protestant faith.
For example, Vivian, a Catholic in her mid-50s, was baptized into the Catholic Church a few years ago. In 2003, her mother passed away. A year later, Vivian was diagnosed with cancer. Feeling depressed, she started to attend church services in the hope of regaining some of her emotional strength. At first, she joined Protestant ser-vices, but did notfind comfort there. After a few months she started attending Catholic churches, and has attended Catholic masses ever since. The reasons she gave me for doing so are as follows:
Ifind each Protestant church different, depending on the preacher. What the preacher says depends on himself. Because of this, Protestant churches differ a lot, they are all very dif-ferent. One preacher tells you this, the other one something else. Also, the readings in the churches are different; this church has different readings than that one, and this week is dif-ferent from that week, because one preacher focuses on this part and the other on that part.
Comments such as Vivian’s are indicative of the relevance that Hong Kong Catholics attach to their religion as a universal organization, endorsed by teachings and rituals expressing one universal message, and related to one prescribed order throughout the liturgical year.
Lastly, the relevance attached to the universal Church is also reflected in the mean-ing my informants ascribe to particular church communities in Hong Kong. Albert’s list, given at the beginning of this section, describes the church (i.e. the particular commu-nity) as a network where people can meet each other and be part of the larger universal Catholic Church. This reflects the ways that most of my informants value individual churches and church communities. In these valuations, the universal again prevails over the local.
As already described, Hong Kong’s Catholic churches exhibit a great variety of architectural styles. Some styles are appreciated by my informants over others. For example, some like to attend Hong Kong’s more historical churches occasionally, e.g. the Rosary Church in Tsim Sha Tsui East (Kowloon), St. Theresa’s Church in Prince Edward (Kowloon), St. Margaret’s Church in Happy Valley (Hong Kong Island), or the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Central (Hong Kong Island, see Figure 2). However, the specific features of these church buildings do not determine the meaning my informants ascribe to them. Let me explain.
According to my informants, local churches in Hong Kong are either focal points with beautiful and inspiring architecture, places to belong to administratively, or simply the closest place where they can attend Catholic Mass. It is important to attend these
Figure 2. The Hong Kong Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a large building well visible between the tall edifices of Hong Kong Island. Photograph by author.
places regularly, preferably every week, to keep relations with fellow churchgoers and to observe mass, but mostly to strengthen their relation with God. As similar masses and other services are offered in every church and as God is present everywhere, they can attend any church, in Hong Kong and worldwide (see also Westendorp2017).
Consider Sarah’s story. Sarah was baptized into the church in Tsuen Wan in 2001. Ever since, she has volunteered in that particular church on important days, for example during the Easter Vigil when dozens of adults are baptized. Even though Sarah appreci-ates the church as the building in which she religiously grew up, it is not the only church she attends. Depending on how busy she is on Sundays, she attends either this church or a church closer to her home in Sha Tin (New Territories). When not in the vicinity, she will try to attend afternoon mass at a church in Prince Edward (Kowloon). Sarah stresses that she is not too concerned about which church she attends as “My church is everywhere. Even Rome is my church.” In effect, she emphasizes that the Catholic Church is a universal organization, and that all churches within and outside of Hong Kong are representations of this one universal Church and of the global family of God.
This not only the case for specific church buildings, but also for Catholic communi-ties. For example, Julia (41 years old) is a member of the Christian Life Community (CLC) Hong Kong. The CLC is a worldwide community of lay Christians who follow the Ignatius model of spirituality. In Hong Kong, there are several CLC groups, each of which consists of fourteen Catholic members who meet once a fortnight to share food, talk about their faith, and support each other. Julia values the group and said that her faith is in large part colored by the experiences she has had as a CLC member. How-ever, the relevance of being a member of CLC will never overshadow her feeling of belonging to the universal Catholic Church. She explained:
I am in CLC because I think the use of small groups is very powerful. It gives me a com-munity that supports me. This support is very important for my faith; it is the formation of my faith. But for me, I still feel I belong to the Church as a whole. I will not have the identity of only belonging to that group [the CLC]. I do not only belong to that community. Our Church as a whole is a universe [universal]. I am not only in the Hong Kong Diocese or in the CLC, but in the Universal Church.
Thus, even though Julia values her local CLC community for her formation, her main identity is still aligned to the universal Catholic Church. Her belonging to the Church, and to the global community of Catholics all around the world, is the most essential part of her faith in the local context of Hong Kong.
In summary, the narratives presented above indicate that the religious practices my informants perform, the Masses they attend, the relationship with God (and conse-quently with the whole family of God) they experience, and their difference to other Christian religions, are what symbolize their connection to a universal religion rather than to a particular church building or community. As a consequence, every Catholic church in Hong Kong and in the world is equally important, and my informants feel they belong to all of them. Importantly, this belonging transcends any particular time and place.
Discussion
Above, I explored my Hong Kong informants’ emphasis on the universal character of Catholicism. Catholicism is localized in the Hong Kong context while at the same time
being universal through time and space. Through rituals and their belonging to the global family of God, my informants express their connection to this universality. The question as to whether Catholicism is truly as universal as my informants describe it to be is not relevant here: what is relevant are the ways in which they, through living their religion, perceive this characteristic in their faith. This characteristic is of significance to them as it makes their religion a stable, almost non-changing, and “true” system, espe-cially in comparison to Protestantism.
Here, a paradox seems to present itself. The informants presented in this report inter-pret and transform the global organization of the Catholic Church tofit their own local needs. But these local needs lead them to emphasize the universal over the local. In these concluding paragraphs, I reflect further on this. Why do Hong Kong Catholics emphasize universality so distinctly? And how does this relate to the discussion about the uncertainty of Hong Kong’s future with which I started this report?
In the literature, “Hong Kong identity” is most often described as being situated somewhere along a continuum between the local (Hong Kong) and the national (the PRC). However, as I have shown above, mainland Chinese and/or Hong Kong identities are not the only categories of belonging that play a role in the life of Hong Kong resi-dents. City people, more than rural residents, have the ability to construct identities at the intersection of local, national, and also global communities (Orsi 1999). This holds true in Hong Kong, where people construct belonging not only in relation to the Hong Kong SAR and the PRC, but also to global organizations and worldviews, e.g. religious views. In their uncertain urban life, Hong Kong residents search for belongings that transcend the particular time and place in which they live. Some of these belongings, e.g. Catholic belongings, transcend the struggle between the local and the national.
The Catholic Church is a prototypical global organization. In terms of identifying with the universal Catholic Church, most Catholics around the world share similar ideas, i.e. that participation in the organization is an integral part of their identity as a Catholic (Lozada 2001). However, there is something particular about the emphasis of Hong Kong Catholics. In this city, the identity of belonging to the Church is not only reli-gious. It is also related to non-religious, political identity, and to the boundaries of what it means to be a Hongkonger, boundaries that are described in media and scholarly sources as unstable and uncertain.
The localization of Catholicism thus has a wider political context related to the ques-tion of what it means to be local in a global world. This is a topic also explored by Eriberto Lozada Jr. (2001), who has studied a Chinese Catholic village in southern China, inhabited by a diasporic group of Hakka. He shows how Catholicism has defined the boundaries of this deterritorialized community while simultaneously connecting the residents of the village to the rest of the world. My conclusion comes close to Lozada’s, with one major difference. The community central to my study is not deterritorialized. Instead, they see Hong Kong, the territory to which they belong, changing as it faces an uncertain future. In this context, they connect to wider, global networks, which become part of their everyday lives.
Hence, in the situation of an ambiguous belonging, Catholicism serves as a stable, unchanging anchor. At the same time, Catholicism shapes my informants’ ontologies. It constitutes a world and provides them with a place in that world. In other words, Catholicism strongly positions Hong Kong Catholics in a global scenario. It offers them a sense of continuity with the past and a relation with others in that world, making them members of the global family of God. Through this, they gain an identification that transcends the complicated relations between the Hong Kong SAR and PRC. As such,
they express a different understanding of what it means to be a “Hongkonger,” and that as residents of Hong Kong and citizens of the PRC, they arefirst and foremost citizens of the world.
Notes
1. The 1997“Handover” transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the PRC, ending over 150 years of colonial power. The official relationship between the Hong Kong SAR and the PRC post-1997 is described in the “one country, two systems” policy, indicating that the socialist system of the PRC will not be practiced in Hong Kong, and that Hong Kong’s way of life (including capitalism) will remain unchanged for a period of 50 years, up to 2047. Despite the existence of this policy, many Hong Kong residents feel their lives in the city increasingly influenced by the mainland Chinese presence.
2. In March 2014, the terms “Hongkonger” and “Hong Kongese” made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, an indication of the rise in their use. According to Civic Party lawmaker Claudia Mo Man-ching, the inclusion of these terms in the dictionary was the result of the attempts of “anti-mainlandization” campaigns to emphasize the cultural and political differ-ences between mainlanders and“Hongkongers” (Lam2014).
3. In this thesis, I use the term“Church” (with a capital letter) to refer to the universal Roman Catholic Church under leadership of the Vatican, and church (small letter) as a local parish, community or building.
4. The remaining points listed by Albert emphasize the importance attributed to prayer, a speci-fic Catholic community or parish, the networks present there, and the services on offer (mostly services that help Albert deepen his faith, e.g. Bible readings, visits to other Hong Kong parishes, and visits to the sick and the elderly in hospitals and retirement homes).
Notes on contributor
Mariske Westendorp, PhD, is an anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of (urban) reli-gion. She received a BA in cultural anthropology and development studies, followed by another in religious studies; she went on to complete an MA in cultural anthropology and religious studies at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands); and a PhD at the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney (Australia). Her PhD research was on the relationship between religious, political and socio-economic aspirations in urban Hong Kong. She is currently employed at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
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