Source: Interfax-Religion
January 15, 2016
The Russian Church needs to consecrate a bishop for ministry in East Asia, rector of Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Hong Kong priest Dionisy Pozdnyayev believes.
"We have a parish in Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Soon there will be parishes in the Philippines. It is East Asia and I believe it is not bad to have a bishop here who would be able to ordain priests from local residents without additional coordination with Moscow," the priest said in his interview to Vesti.ru.
According to him, a hierarch is also needed "to balance our relations with the Constantinople Patriarchate as Greeks have a metropolis in Korea, in Hong Kong and Singapore. We don't."
"I was impressed by the number of Catholic missionaries who left Poland for China over the course of 150 years from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Poland gave a thousand missionaries, two thirds of whom were women. France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain also sent missionaries, and America. So when they ask me how I evaluate the results of the Russian Church's missionary work in China, I consider it unsatisfactory," Father Dionisy said.
According to him, there are about 100 million Christians among the population of 1.5 billion: about 17 million Catholics, and 80-83 million Protestants.
"Western authors even introduced a new term, 'Christian fever' to describe what happened in China in the last 20-30 years. There has never been such dynamics in growth of the number of Christians in any country of the world," the priest said.
