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KOREA
Reunions after 50 years
New exchanges could open door for prelates to visit
In a message dated August 15—which is both the Feast of the Assumption and the national holiday of Korea—Archbishop Nicholas Cheong of Seoul called for special prayers for the country, both North and South.
Archbishop Cheong said that the Marian feast and national holiday—which celebrates the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan—should be the occasion for a new national commitment to “genuine liberation, unification, and prosperity.”
August 15 was also the date set for the first meeting for separated Korean families divided by the Korean War. According to the terms of a deal struck by the political leaders of North and South Korea, one plane carried 100 people from Pyongyang to Seoul, then returned carrying another 100 people north. The exchange, which involved only a tiny proportion of the families separated by the war, allowed family members to see each other for the first time in 50 years.
The Communist government of North Korea imposed tight controls on the exchanges in an effort to prevent defections. The Seoul government, on the other hand, gave $500 to each family involved in the exchange, to be given to relatives in the impoverished North.
The exchange program ended on August 18. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung has said that he will ask his counterparts in Pyongyang to allow more families to visit their relatives in future exchange programs.
The open exchanges opened other doors as well, including possible contacts with the small Catholic community in the Communist country. The South Korean minister of tourism, Park Ji-Won, has announced that Cardinal Stephen Kim and Archbishop Cheong may be asked to visit North Korea. The South Korean spokesman said that his government hoped to arrange visits for the leaders of all the major religions represented in the South: Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Korean native traditional religions.
“I see the visit of religious leaders to the North as the first step in religious exchanges between the two Koreas,” Archbishop Cheong said. Archbishop Cheong is also the apostolic administrator of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Because North Korea has been a closed society for years, with no sources of information outside the rigid Communist regime, the outside world knows nothing about what has happened to the previous bishop of Pyongyang, Francis Hon Yong-Ho, who would be 94 if he is still alive.
“My earnest desire is to confirm the clergy and faithful who remain in the North in their faith,” Archbishop Cheong said. “I want to meet them directly. If they have died I want to pray at their tombs. Also I want to know how North Korean Catholics are living their life of faith.”
An estimated 2,000 Catholics are still living in North Korea. But after years of Communist oppression, there are no priests or religious known to be active in the country.
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