TALK: Passive Compliance to Occupy Central: Catholicism, Democracy, Hong Kong | UW Catholic Newman Center

I will be giving a talk at 4 PM today at the University of Washington’s Catholic Newman Center. The talk is entitled Passive Compliance to Occupy Central: Catholicism, Democracy, and Hong Kong. It will be in the Siena Room.

The talk is propelled by the recent Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. As we saw over the last week, the retired Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong, Joseph Cardinal Zen, has come out swinging for the students — and sometimes even at the students. While the press has picked up that many Christians have led the recent democracy movements in Hong Kong, this talk will focus on the specifically Catholic elements of the democracy movements. This does not mean that the Roman Catholic Church as a whole has been supportive of the democracy movements; it means rather that we need to understand some of the history of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong to understand some of its current participation in the Umbrella Movement. Here’s the abstract:

With the takeoff of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, it has been revealed that the Roman Catholic Church, especially retired bishop Joseph Cardinal Zen, has played a big role in inspiring the student protests and democratic movements in Hong Kong, as well as criticizing them. This talk will give some background into what the Church has done in relation to Hong Kong democracy movements. It focuses on the practice of ‘passive compliance’ in the Hong Kong Catholic Church’s role in Sino-Vatican relations in keeping with John Baptist Cardinal Wu’s 1989 pastoral letter, March into the Bright Decade.

I hope to have this recorded so that I can get some public feedback for this talk. I’m hoping to rework this talk into a paper for publication, so I will need all the feedback that I can get. I’m thankful that the Catholic Newman Center at the UW has agreed to host this talk at such short notice, and I look forward to the conversation that it will produce.

SOUNDCLOUD: Here’s the talk itself. Apologies for the sound cutting in and out. This is my first recording and was done on my phone — I have learned that to do these more effectively, I will need to wear a mic. Also, the approach I adopt is more like that of a classroom, so there is some audience conversation and informal language.