Joseph Zen mixes the book and big issues

Mass had scarcely ended on June 4 when a gaggle of young women flocked to the front of the cathedral. Groups of them took turns having their photos taken with the thin, silver-haired 74-year-old who so captured their fancy: Cardinal Joseph Zen Zi-kiun (陳日君).

He smiled gently for the photos, then walked across an alley to an indoor basketball court with a concrete floor and rusty fans on the walls that barely stirred the warm, humid air. After a youth group had sung religious songs, and after a slide show depicting the Chinese military crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, he read a strongly worded message calling for residents of Hong Kong to remember their countrymen elsewhere in China.

"The young people who fought and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square were their brothers and sisters," he said in the speech. "After June 4, we can no longer fight selfishly just to win the most rights for Hong Kong."

With his charisma, erudition and dedication to human rights, Zen has become a celebrity here, a man wielding considerable political influence as well as religious power. But his high profile and growing influence have antagonized senior officials in mainland China, particularly those who oversee the state-controlled church.

His elevation to cardinal in February was called "a hostile act" by Liu Bainian (劉柏年), the general secretary of the state-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. Chinese officials routinely blame Zen for their troubled relations with the Vatican, notably when China pushed through the consecration of two bishops this spring without the approval of the Holy See.

"Unfortunately, the Vatican listened to irresponsible suggestions by a clergyman in Hong Kong and issued a severe condemnation" of the appointments, Ye Xiaowen (葉小文), the director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, said in an interview.

Zen said that some Chinese government officials saw him as siding with the Vatican against his country.

He described that as "a really foolish way of thinking," adding: "I may also contribute to the Chinese side because I can explain to them what is the normal operation of a church in China or elsewhere, to free them from many fears they have against the Church."

Zen has legions of defenders in the West, and even some on in China. China's Confucian tradition, never stamped out under communism, confers high status on scholars, and Zen is widely admired as a thoughtful, soft-spoken man who speaks several Chinese dialects in addition to fluent English, Italian and Latin.

Lu Xinhua (呂新華), the commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong, said that he had not met the cardinal since his arrival here early this year but that he hoped to do so. "I've heard he is a teacher, and from talking to him I can deepen myself," he said.

Zen grew up in a poor area of Shanghai, where as a boy he enjoyed family trips to a Salesian church atop a hill on the city's outskirts.

"That holy shrine is really an attraction, and so when we were children it was a big event to be able to go on pilgrimage" there, he recalled in an interview.

The family, never well off, fell into poverty after the Japanese capture of Shanghai in 1937. His father first lost his job doing technical drawings and then had a stroke that left him paralyzed. But Zen pursued his education, for free, with the Salesian order, and went to Hong Kong and then Turin, Italy, to study for the priesthood.