hankyoreh

The official itinerary for Pope Francis’s August visit to South Korea was released recently, and it is essentially the same as the initial itinerary. It even includes the hotly opposed visit to the Kkottongnae community in Eumseong, North Chungcheong Province. While the itinerary is packed with big events, including the beatification ceremony at Gwanghwamun, it is missing Pope Francis‘s signature style.

Who is Pope Francis? He invited the janitorial staff at the Vatican to attend the first morning mass after his coronation in March 2013. On Easter, he brought in Muslim women and the disabled and washed their feet. He had three homeless foreign nationals living in the Vatican come to his birthday celebration.

And that’s not all. The pope has denounced unchecked neoliberalism, labeling it a new dictatorship. On a trip to the Middle East, he visited the West Bank, the home of the downtrodden Palestinians, before Israel. More recently, he excommunicated the Mafia during a visit to their stronghold in Italy. “The church must combat evil such as this,” Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis’s revolutionary words and deeds are bringing courage and consolation to people groaning under injustice and violence all over the world. There are also many in South Korea who have been longing for a papal visit, the way parched land cries out for rain.

There are the bereaved families of the 304 lives lost when the Sewol ferry sank. There are the comfort women, who were forced to work as sexual slaves by the Japanese imperial army and are still suffering today. There are the dismissed Ssangyong Motor workers, who find themselves in such dire straits that 25 of them have committed suicide or died from illness over the past five years. There are the people evicted from their homes and businesses in Yongsan, Miryang, and Gangjeong Village in Jeju Island.

But it is becoming more likely that these people’s hopes will be dashed. Perhaps it is because the South Korean catholic church is led by people like Cardinal Cheong Jin-suk, who defended the administration of former president Lee Myung-bak by expressing his support for the Four Major Rivers Project despite the statement made by the South Korean bishops condemning the project, people like Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, who winked at illegality by criticizing the near majority of priests, monks, and nuns who called for President Park Geun-hye to step down for failing to hold anyone accountable for state institutions’ interference in the 2012 presidential election and undermining the constitutional order in South Korea.

Furthermore, last year Cardinal Cheong gave his blessing to a new building at the Catholic University of Korea intended for pharmaceutical study that was named for him. This would have been hard to imagine as recently as when the late Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan was still with us.

How different this is from the attitude of Pope Francis! The pope preaches that bishops and cardinals are not to act like earthly princes, resides in a room in the Vatican guesthouse instead of the papal apartments, and generally spends time with the poor, not the rich.

There are worries that those leaders of the South Korean Catholic church could stain the reputation that Pope Francis, who is giving up his summer vacation to fly 14 hours from the other side of the world to South Korea, has worked so hard and risked his life to develop. However, the pope has visited the poor and hurting wherever he travels, speaking for justice. We can only hope that he will remember that in South Korea, as well, those who thirst after justice are anxiously waiting for him.

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