Local News

Korean Catholics welcome new priest

Editor’s Note: The Korean Catholic Community recently welcomed two new Korean sisters in addition to their new pastor. The sisters’ story will appear in the March 25 issue.

By Kelly DuFort
Anchor Writer

A handmade pink welcome sign decorating the front doors of the Korean Center signifies a recent changing of the guard for Anchorage’s Korean Catholic Community.

The community, which shares St. Anthony Church with that parish, recently welcomed a new pastor from South Korea’s Cheongju Diocese, Father Min-Sung Peter Yu.

In a Feb. 20 ceremony, Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz installed the priest for service to the Korean Catholic Community.

As the community members welcomed Father Yu, they also said goodbye to Father In Yong Anselm Shin, also of the Cheongju Diocese, who served as their pastor for almost three years.

The departing priest assured Father Yu that his new parishioners are "really generous and doing well in their faith," Father Yu said, speaking through interpreter Hyosin Mary Wilson.

Between laughs, Father Yu, dressed in a long black cassock, used some of the English he learned in school, such as, "I like skiing — downhill," which he did recently on the slopes of Mount Alyeska at the invitation of some of his young new parishioners. Parish altar servers were his guides on the ski slopes in Korea, the 41-year-old priest added.

Serving abroad

In the Cheongju Diocese, southeast of Seoul, priests can express a general preference for an overseas assignment and then are appointed to a region, according to Father Yu.

The diocese ministers to Korean-Americans in Alabama, California and Missouri and has been sending priests to Anchorage since 1997 at the request of Anchorage Archbishop Francis Hurley, who has since retired. For seven years before that, priests from Korea’s Taegu Diocese ministered to Anchorage’s Korean Catholics.

Father Yu is the seventh Korean priest to serve the community, according to Wilson, a longtime member of the Korean Catholic Community and 30-year Anchorage resident.

"It’s a gift that we have — the Korean priests," she said.

Hearing the Mass in her native language helps her connect better to the liturgy, she said.

"I am more touched by my own language," she said. "We can grow more in our language."

The majority of Anchorage’s Korean Catholic parishioners are first-generation immigrants who grew up praying and worshiping in their homeland, Wilson said.

It’s not by way of a vocations boom that Korean priests come to Anchorage but because of a mission to care for their Catholic people in the United States, Father Yu said.

"It’s a hardship for the Cheongju Diocese to send priests here," he said, but "it is very important … for Korean people to be looked after so they can grow in faith."

The diocese’s Web site shows that as of Dec. 31, 2003, there were 135 priests serving 130,422 Catholics there.

Father Yu has served in parish leadership roles since his ordination in 1992. For the last three years, he was pastor to the 2,000 families of Bong-Bang-do Catholic Church in Chung-ju, population 200,000. That’s about 60,000 residents shy of Anchorage’s population.

Independence

The Korean Catholic Community, now with 190 families, started with about ten families who gathered to pray in their own language in the early 1980s.

The community worships at St. Anthony but has long dreamed of having its own church, Wilson said. Members have raised money selling traditional Korean food over the years with that goal in mind.

Wilson said their own church would encourage greater involvement among inactive Korean Catholics.

Father Yu has quickly adopted the community’s dream.

"The needs of our Korean Catholic Community (include) being physically independent," he said.

Father Yu said he wants to "build a firm ground (that) our Korean Catholics can stand on where we can obtain our own spaces."

On a recent Saturday night, Father Yu and two Korean Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres, Sister Dothilia Moon and Sister Acella Lee, visited the home of Gabriel and Lithia Kim in east Anchorage. There they prayed with about 10 people from one of the Korean Catholic Community’s seven "small village groups" scattered around Anchorage.

Sitting on the floor at short tables, they shared a meal of tempura-fried vegetables, kim chee and "hae dup bop" — a mixed bowl of spicy noodles, cuttlefish, salmon, steak, rice and flying-fish roe. The village group meets monthly to pray the rosary, share Scripture and plan fund-raisers.

At each meeting, Wilson said, they pray for a church.

At the dinner table, Father Yu explained how his godmother’s prayers worked in his life. In 1965, his mother, nine months pregnant, bounced along an unpaved road in a bus for two hours to attend the installation of Father Peter Hwang Seong-min as bishop of the Taejon Diocese.

On the return trip, she gave birth to him in the bus with the help of a woman who became his godmother. The impromptu midwife named him after the new bishop, Peter, and prayed for him to become a priest, which he did 27 years later.

Moving to Anchorage, which Father Yu said his colleagues in Korea regard as "the wilds," happened after a "long, hard week of prayer," he said.

Father Yu’s Anchorage assignment is for two years with an option to extend after that.