Featured Image: Wikimedia Commons
– Pedro Daniel Oliveira
Started early this month, the chapel of Saint Lawrence’s Church is holding a Sunday Mass in Bahasa Indonesia, in order to keep the faith of the local Indonesian Catholics, since some have embraced other Christian denominations, and to maintain their solidarity. The celebration is held every first and fourth Sunday of the month, and begins at 5:00 PM.
“There is a slogan ‘100% Catholic, 100% Indonesian’,” Fr Vincentius Lam, SJ, told O CLARIM on the reason the new Mass was put in place in the Macau Diocese.
“Before, they would have the Mass in the SVD house, and since nowadays the house is used by another community, we decided to choose another place,” he said.
Fr Lam added that the chapel of Saint Lawrence’s Church was chosen for a more practical and apostolic reason, since “it is not far from SVD house, so it will make the access simple and the place easy to remember. The actual Indonesian community attending the Mass is not so big in number – around 10 people.
Having the latter reality in mind, it was suggested to Bishop Stephen Lee to integrate the Sunday Mass as “the extension” of the Hong Kong Indonesian Catholic Workers Community, Fr Lam added.
“First of all, ‘the extension’ here means it was served by a SVD priest, who is working in Hong Kong, and comes once or twice a month,” he explained, to preside over a “Catholic liturgical activity.”
“There are some other Indonesian groups in Macau, and some of the community members also join these groups,” he said, while not forgetting “most of the Indonesians in Macau are workers and Moslems.” And since the local Catholic Indonesian community “is just few in number, we prefer to keep ‘the extension’ first,” and the aforementioned “community as a part of Indonesian Catholic community in Hong Kong,” which he described as “quite big in number – around 200-300 people who attend Church activities every Sunday.”
“By introducing this community to the public, we hope we can let the other people born in Indonesia, especially Chinese overseas who moved out from Indonesia around the 70s and 80s, during the Communist movement, and finally stayed in Macau as residents and still can speak Bahasa Indonesia, to join together. Or, perhaps some others who are taking vacation in Macau and would like to keep the faith and don’t speak Chinese,” he said.
The Bahasa Indonesia Sunday Mass at the chapel of Saint Lawrence’s Church is also celebrated by Fr Gregorius Dedi Rusdianto, SCJ, and Fr Kornelius Supranoto Bardata, SVD.
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