The Diocese of Hong Kong has called The Pillar’s coverage of a recent speech by Cardinal Stephen Chow SJ “regrettable” and said the cardinal’s address to a conference in Rome last week was a “moment of communion” which has been “turned into a story of capitulation.”
The speech, delivered at a Nov. 5 conference commemorating the centenary of the consecration of the first Chinese-born Catholic bishops. The conference was held at the Urbaniana University, run by the Dicastery for Evangelization, discussed the history and contemporary reality of the Church in China, and the concept of inculturation and the mainland government policy of sinicization.
In the Sunday Examiner, the official newspaper of the Hong Kong diocese, an unsigned leading editorial on Nov. 7 said that Chow had not “defended sinicization as a form of inculturation” but presented the two concepts as distinct, and cited The Pillar’s coverage by name repeatedly.