By Gerard O'ConnellVATICAN CITY : The enchanting sound of Chinese hymns being sung by catechumens in the crypt of a church in the medieval Italian city of Prato, about 20 minutes train ride from Florence, reveals the presence of a small but flourishing Chinese Catholic community in the historic heartland of Italy's textile industry.
Bibles in Chinese are visible on the table around which 12 catechumens are sitting. Sister Gianou, a young Chinese nun from the Immaculate Heart of Mary order in Hebei, near Beijing, is conducting a meeting. She has come up from Rome where she is studying, to lead the two-week catechesis for these adults. The course is being held in the second half of August, the traditional vacation period for workers in Italy.
The program of introduction to the Christian faith is coordinated by Father Francesco, a 36-year-old Chinese priest from the diocese of Qiqihar, in Heilongjiang province, China. After completing three years of higher studies at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome, he has taken over as priest for the Chinese community here, replacing another priest from the same diocese.
Like his predecessor, Father Francesco is deputy-parish priest at the Church of Ascenion al Pino in the western periphery of Prato, which the local Bishop Gastone Simoni of Prato designated as the church for Chinese in this city in Tuscany.
Father Paolo Baldanzi, the Italian parish priest of the church, reckons half of the 4,500 people in his parish are Chinese, but only a tiny percent are Catholic. He told UCA News that there are some 120 Chinese Catholics in Prato, and more than 80 of them attend Sunday Mass each week. When the Catholic mission for the Chinese opened here less than 10 years ago, there were only five or six Catholics, he said, but now an increasing number of Chinese are becoming interested in Christianity.
While the Catholic Church in Prato, like elsewhere in Italy, has opened its doors to the Chinese and seeks to assist them in various ways, many local people have begun to react negatively to the growing Chinese presence. Tensions between Italians and Chinese are said to be high in cities across Italy, according to media reports.The Chinese began to settle here at the end of the 1980s and today, according to Prato's newly elected mayor, Roberto Cenni, the city has the highest ratio of Chinese to local population of any city in Europe. Estimates vary, but Church and municipal authorities reckon there are 40 -50,000 Chinese (from all over China) in this city of 186,000 inhabitants.
But only 10,000 of the Chinese are regular, documented workers with residence papers, Cenni told UCA News. The rest are unregistered workers and classified as "clandestine" by Italy's center right-government led by Silvio Berlusconi.
To be a clandestine migrant in Italy today is a crime, punishable by a sizable fine and expulsion. The hunt is on to identify these undocumented migrants. The Church has criticized the severity of this new legislation and, Father Santino Brunetti, whom the local bishop has appointed as vicar for migrants in Prato, recently told the city's Catholics they have a moral obligation "to hide the undocumented migrants" just as they did the Jews and other persecuted groups during World War II.
For the past 50 years Prato was governed by a centre-left coalition, but the ever-growing presence of the Chinese who have taken control of most of the city's famous textile industry, has provoked a political backlash among local people, as many locals lost jobs in the Chinese takeover.
As a result, in the recent administrative elections, the people of Prato voted into power a broad center-right coalition that includes the xenophobic Northern League. The coalition was led by the wealthy textile industrialist, Cenni, who campaigned under the slogan, "Regain Prato for the Pratesi."
Cenni said the Chinese now own 3,000 textile factories, import raw materials from China, and undercut the local industry with low prices as they rapidly produce pronta-moda (instant fashion) clothing.
They also circumvent Italian law in various ways, the mayor alleged. They employ undocumented Chinese workers, pay little or no taxes or social insurance for these workers, and sometimes open a factory only to close it 18 months later, making it almost impossible for authorities to determine how many are employed in a given factory. Moreover, he said, their factory employees frequently work at home and cannot be identified easily.Cenni wants to bring law and order to this rapidly evolving reality, and recently the Italian government supported him by sending troops into Prato's Chinatown, to the applause of many locals who hailed them as a liberation army.
The presence of the troops was meant to symbolize that change is coming.The mayor, who owns textile factories in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and mainland China, has a clear strategy for all undocumented migrant workers from Africa and Asia in Prato -- they have to either become regularized or go elsewhere.
Cenni charged that the Chinese are buying up houses, restaurants, shops and bars, and paying in cash for all to create a Chinatown in Prato. He queried where all this money was coming from, and wondered if money laundering was involved. He also questioned how the Chinese are able to send an astronomical sum of money out of Prato each year -- 500 million euros.
Father Francesco, a newcomer to Prato and not yet fully informed about the local reality, does not challenge the mayor's figures for unregistered Chinese workers, but commenting on the large amount of money being sent out of the Prato by the Chinese, emphasized that a great many Chinese work 16 hours a day here, and save money.
Communication between the Italian and Chinese population is a major problem in Prato, the mayor said. He recently issued a decree ordering the blotting-out of all notices that are only written in Chinese.
Father Francesco concurs with the mayor that language communication is a big problem, as most Chinese do not speak Italian and have little, if any time to study it, while almost no Italian speaks Chinese. For this reason, the Church in Italy has appointed a Chinese priest here to care for the people, and the parish is building a new complex to provide space for various pastoral activities, including a place where it can provide Italian classes for the Chinese.
The priest and the mayor agree that the real hope of overcoming the language barrier rests with the younger generation of Chinese -- the children who attend Italian schools. Chinese count for 40 percent of the student population in some of the city's schools, the mayor said.
While Father Francesco is fluent in Italian, and runs a Chinese Catholic community in Prato website (www.cccprato.org) in Italian, English and Chinese, none of the catechumens speak Italian. One of them, however, a young woman known as "Rossi" speaks fluent English. She taught English back home in the mainland and now teaches English here to the Chinese migrants.
She told UCA News that she became a catechumen after participating in a two-day "pilgrimage" that Father Francesco organized for Chinese Catholics in Prato, and which many non-Christians like herself joined. Traveling in two coaches, they visited Christian sites in Milan and Venice, and the shrine of Saint Anthony in Padua.
During the pilgrimage they talked about God, Christianity and learned about "the glorious" history of these famous Christian places. This had a big impact on all of them, and Rossi said she returned home "wanting to know more about this God who spoke to mankind."
She asked to learn more about the Christian God and how he can help her face problems in her life, and so became a catechumen.
She hopes to be baptized by Bishop Simoni, along with her fellow catechumens, during the Easter Vigil in Prato Cathedral in 2010, thereby adding new members to this small Chinese Catholic community which is growing, even in these difficult times.
Courtesy : UCAN
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