NBCNews: In August, the Archdiocese of New York shuttered and merged churches in parts of New York City, including St. Joseph’s in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Speaking in Mandarin, Rocco Wong, a Chinese-American parishioner of St. Joseph’s, told NBC News, “In many instances, Chinese are afraid to say something, to speak out.”
That, however, has not been the case with Wong and hundreds of fellow Chinese-American Catholics, many of them immigrants from the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, who have made St. Joseph’s their spiritual home for the last two decades. On one Sunday afternoon, in early August before the 2 p.m. Mandarin-language mass began at nearby St. Teresa’s, parishioners from St. Joseph’s took a moment to reflect on the closure of their church and what it means to be Chinese and Catholic in America. More here.
