Mobile apps assist Catholics in freezing northeast China
Direct pastoral care remains best solution for older generations during the harsh winter months.
 |
In northeastern provinces, such as Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning, the average temperature drops below zero degrees Celsius for four to six months a year.
"Our community will dispatch small gifts when evangelizing in summer," said an underground Catholic in Harbin who identified herself as Teresa.
"But in winter it is just too cold and now that the smog gets serious year by year, it makes us reluctant to go out," she said.
Harbin is the provincial capital of Heilongjiang province, where more and more Catholics turned underground after the excommunication of an illicit bishop in 2012.
Separately, there are about 100,000 Catholics in each of the three northeastern provinces.
In neighboring Jilin, a Catholic webmaster, who identified himself as Paul, told ucanews.com that Sunday Mass numbers drop dramatically during the winter months.
"In our parish, the number of churchgoers on Sunday reduces to half from that of summer," Paul said. "But the attendees of course rebounded to normal on Christmas as it is one of the four most important feasts in China," he said.
On Christmas Eve, the temperature in Harbin fell to 26 degrees below zero.
"Some non-Catholic families did not allow their elderly parents to attend the midnight Mass as they feared for their safety due to slippery roads at night," said an underground seminarian in Harbin.
"So it is a custom that our priests would go and visit the elderly Catholics before Christmas to hear confession and deliver holy Communion for them," he said.
To overcome the freezing weather, the Internet and mobile apps become valuable evangelization tools.
"We use Wechat and QQ friends groups to connect fellow Catholics," said Teresa about the Chinese social media platforms that are similar to Twitter and Facebook.
Some college students from outside provinces said online groups help them find church locations when they came to study in Heilongjiang.
Introduced in 2011, the Wechat app is getting more popular with the number of users surpassing 600 million in China and 1.2 billion around the world last May. Wechat offers a public platform for organizations and many church groups in China, including the Harbin Apostolic Prefecture of the underground community and Jilin Diocese, who use it to create online religious readings.
However, Paul, the webmaster, said he has reservations on how effective Wechat is due to the busy life of office workers and college students.
"Our Wechat public platform has 500 subscribers but the rate of page views is dissatisfactory," he said.
"The majority of the elderly Catholics don't use the internet or mobile apps to connect with the church. So family visits by parish priests are still necessary," he added.
In addition, news dissemination is restricted in China. "We were once banned from reposting a news report from the website of the State Administrative for Religious Affairs. It is an official announcement but why can't we repost it?" Teresa asked.
Despite rapid Internet development in the country, China is often criticized for its lack of online freedom.
According to U.S.-based Freedom House, China ranked last among 65 countries in its most recent Internet freedom survey, The Freedom on the Net 2015. Released last October, the survey determined its ranking based on three aspects: obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights.
Source: UCAN
No comments:
Post a Comment