Bishop Stephen Lee asks Catholics to pray for Hong Kong

Marco Carvalho

The Bishop of Macau, Stephen Lee Bun-sang, convened a special prayer novena for the citizens of neighbouring Hong Kong and urged the local Catholics to pray for the end to the Covid-19 outbreak which is devastating the former British colony. Starting this Friday and until March 19th, a prayer released earlier by Pope Francis will be recited in all the local parishes, alongside the Prayer to Saint Roch which has been intoned in Macau churches since the early days of the pandemic.

The image of Saint Roch, protector against the plague and the patron saint of the sick and invalids, was borrowed from Saint Lazarus parish by Bishop Stephen Lee more than two years ago and has been at the entrance of the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady ever since. Back then, the bishop of Macau also asked the local Catholics to invoke Saint Roch in their prayers and prayer intentions. The saint, some claim, has kept Macau safe for the last two years.

The cult of Saint Roch emerged in the second half of the 15th century in northern Italy and experienced a rapid expansion in the decades that followed, reaching the ends of the earth. In Macau, the devotion to the patron saint of the sick and invalids is particularly strong in Saint Lazarus parish, Father João Lau told O Clarim: “The origin of this devotion to Saint Roch arose about two centuries ago, in the early 1800s, because of a very serious health problem. This area was affected by an outbreak of plague,” the priest said. “People were dying of the plague. Back then, almost all of the inhabitants of this area were Christians. The neighborhood at that time was known as the Christendom of Saint Lazarus. Because of the plague, the residents of Saint Lazarus convened a novena and when that novena was finished, they organized a procession in honor of Saint Roch. The plague disappeared soon after the novena,” the parish priest of Saint Lazarus added.

To thank the saint for his intercession, the residents of the area started to promote a yearly novena and procession to Saint Roch on the second Sunday of July. 

The invocation of the patron saint of the sick and the invalids was interrupted in the mid-60s, following the “12-3 incident,” but was restored about two decades ago by Father Luís Gonzaga Ló, when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome menaced Macau: “This procession – these religious acts related to Saint Roch – was one of the processions that were abandoned due to the ‘12-3 incident.’ Apart from the procession of Our Lady of Fátima and the procession of the Passion of Our Lord, all the other processions fell into oblivion,” Father João Lau told O Clarim. “The Saint Roch procession was resurrected when Hong Kong and Macau were under the threat of SARS. At that time, Father Luís Gonzaga Ló organized the procession once again. And it has been carried out without interruption ever since,” Father Lau concludes.

Up to Wednesday this week, Hong Kong has recorded a total of 290,987 new cases and 1,543 deaths from Covid-19, more than triple compared to last week. Macau is one of the few countries and territories where SARS-CoV2 has not yet caused any fatalities.