EDITORIAL The Catholic content of President Kims
Nobel Prize
Forgive a certain parochial tone
here, but in virtually all the news accounts of South Korean President Kim Dae
Jungs Nobel Peace Prize, there was scant attention paid to the
significant role his Catholic faith has played in his formation.
President Kim is the first Korean to receive a Nobel Prize and was
cited for his tireless efforts for peace and reconciliation on the Korean
peninsula, the last frontier of the Cold War.
Cardinal Stephen Kim Sou-hwan, retired archbishop of Seoul, who
first nominated Kim as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, said,
The award is an honor not only for President Kim but also for the entire
Korean people. President Kims efforts for democracy and human rights were
finally recognized internationally.
Shortly after the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Kim as this
years laureate, he said that he would share the peace honor with victims
of South Koreas past authoritarian regimes, and his supporters at home
and abroad. I will continue to make efforts for democracy and peace on
the Korean peninsula and throughout Asia and the world, he said.
Kim faced many trials, including attempts on his life and years of
imprisonment and exile under past military regimes. In those tumultuous years
when South Korea was under the authoritarian grip of President Park Chung Hee,
Kim successively became a dissident, an exile, a death-row prisoner and, again,
an exile. Through it all, he was a determined human rights campaigner and a
champion of democracy.
The darkest moments came in 1973 when the exiled Kim was kidnapped
from a Tokyo hotel by agents of the South Korean government and was about to be
dumped, bound and blindfolded, into the sea when agents from the United States
intervened to save him.
Kim ties his current passion for peace and reconciliation to a
spiritual experience he said he had at that time. As his political enemies
prepared to drown him, God intervened, he said. I used to pray twice a
day, he said, but at that crucial moment I didnt and was only
thinking about how I could save myself. At that moment, Jesus Christ stood
beside me. I firmly held his sleeves, honestly begging for my life. A few
seconds later, red beams of light flashed through my blindfold, and I heard a
boom, boom! Then there was the sound of planes approaching and somebody calling
my name.
His life was spared.
All my hard trials experienced in the past -- imprisonment,
frequent detention, torture and forced exiles -- happened in the process of
Gods redemptive work, he said in 1993, and in that sense, I
think, I have also participated in Gods salvation project.
Such a strong religious outlook is not unusual for Koreans,
according to scholars of Koreas contemporary religious history. Andrew E.
Kim, writing for Korea Overseas Information Service, notes that Koreas
long history of political vulnerability to Chinese and Japanese control,
Japanese colonialism and then the Korean War has provided fertile ground for
Christianity and its theology of salvation-in-history.
The Catholic church in South Korea during the past four decades
has been a rallying point in Korean society for human rights causes.
Christianity, first introduced to Korea in the late 1700s, has
grown faster in South Korea than in almost any other country. Though estimates
of the Christian population vary, reliable data-gatherers say it increased from
4 million in 1974 to 22 million -- nearly half the population -- in 1997. About
3 million of those are Roman Catholics.
An intriguing aspect of Koreas introduction to Christianity
is that it came through laymen rather than missionary priests. Around 1770,
Chong Tu-won learned about Christianity through Catholic literature encountered
on a visit to China. He brought it back to Korea, where scholars with a strong
interest in Western civilization studied it.
Although Korean Catholics are often described as conservative, the
label hardly fits President Kim. I firmly belief that God exists and
lives in a variety of forms, also in Buddhism, Confucianism and other
religions, he said.
National Catholic Reporter, October 27,
2000
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