NYT Profile of Cardinal Joseph Zen Zi-kiun
Saturday's New York Times has an interesting profile of Hong Kong's new Cardinal, Joseph Zen Zi-kiun:
Like many here, he watched with fascination and then horror as the democracy protests unfolded in Beijing in the spring of 1989. The killings of protesters in and around Tiananmen Square was a turning point in his life, he said, motivating him to spend the next seven years traveling to mainland seminaries to teach.
He kept fairly quiet about his own political views during those years, as he developed close friendships in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere with many priests and bishops in both the government-supervised churches and the "underground." The underground churches are closely watched by the police and face levels of persecution that vary widely among provinces.
It was after he became Hong Kong's junior bishop, in 1996, that he began to develop a reputation for strong comments about civil liberties. But he became much more outspoken after September 2002, when he took over the Hong Kong diocese following the death of the senior bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal John Wu. He soon emerged as a leader in the successful campaign to block the imposition of stringent internal security regulations here, an effort that brought 500,000 people into the streets on July 1, 2003.