Hong Kong, March 28, 2020: An Irish missionary priest, Father Michael Cuddigan of the Society of St. Columban, says he would prefer to die rather than leave the faithful in Hong Kong despite the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
“Like all missionaries, I’ve been through my dangerous moments in the past, so you just live with what’s what and don’t get too excited. We’ve all got to die sometime,” the rector of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Chapel in Central, Hong Kong, he told The Irish Catholic, Ireland’s biggest and best-selling religious newspaper.
With Church services cancelled for over a month, Father Cuddigan was asked if the foreign missionaries in the region would consider leaving for their native land. He said, “Missionaries don’t tend to leave their post, because if they leave their post then local people can lose hope. I saw that happening many times in the southern Philippines in the 1970s during the Muslim- Christian conflict.” He spent over three decades in the Philippines before coming to Hong Kong.
“We don’t know if it’s going to increase or decrease; one moment they say it’s decreasing, another moment it’s increasing, it’s a wait-and-see game. We’re all going around with our masks and washing our hands with alcohol and so on, we just don’t know what the future will be,” Father Cuddigan told the Catholic weekly.
The Diocese of Hong Kong has issued a general dispensation from Mass obligation to help people avoid public gatherings and stem the spread of the virus. It announced the suspension of all public Masses on Sundays and weekdays from February 15, including the Ash Wednesday liturgy that marks the beginning of the Lenten season. With no respite in sight from the pandemic, the possibility for Holy Week and Easter liturgies remain grim.
“There are no Masses in all the churches but people can still come and pray,” Father Cuddigan said.
“There’s concern for everybody because there has been a number of cases already, but often these are people who have been in China or in other parts of the world and got infected,” he observed. As of March 23, a total of 317 cases of infection were reported in Hong Kong with four deaths.
News from mainland China has been promising as only 19 new cases were reported on March 23. The spread of the virus there has been contained, although it claimed 3,270 lives as of March 22. But the situations in Europe and United States are alarming. As of March 25, over 6,800 people have perished in Italy while Spain has lost over 2,690 of its citizens. The latest statistics show over 408,820 people infected around the world (inclusive of those who have recovered) with 18,317 fatalities; 101.040 people have recovered.