Cardinal Zen Ze-kiun at the symposium on “Jesus is my contemporary”

(February 11.2012) "Jesus is my contemporary through the saints and people who are suffering": said Card. Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, summing up his experience speaking at the international conference "Jesus our contemporary" promoted by the Italian Bishops Conference. Speaking on Thursday before several hundred people, Card. Zen spoke of his personal life in Shanghai and Hong Kong and the period when he was teaching in the seminaries of mainland China. He underlined the deep faith of the Chinese Church, as well as the difficulties in which it is immersed. The "contemporary nature of Jesus" is also seen from the "contemporary nature of the cross," said the cardinal and he recalled a great champion of the faith in China, Anthony Li Duan, the late bishop of Xian, a great promoter of the unity of the Church in China, and unity with the pope. Card. Zen said that in 2000 Bishop Li Duan twice refused to submit to the religious policy of the party, refusing to go to an illicit episcopal ordination (without the mandate of the Pope) and a meeting in Beijing where he was to sign a document against Pope John Paul II (who had canonized the Chinese martyrs).Card. Zen has shown that even within the pressures and persecutions, there are many conversions to Christianity in China. And in Hong Kong, a small community of 350 thousand faithful in a population of 7 million people, every year there are thousands of adult baptisms.