Br Karl Emerick (right) is living in Hong Kong as part of a year-long novitiate with the Order. The Queensland man sheds some light on what the first six months of his experience has entailed in Queensland’s Catholic Leader. This is part one of three.
It was zero degrees the morning in late July last year when I left Brisbane to come to Hong Kong.
Since February I had been living in the priory at Our Lady of Graces, Carina, undertaking a pre-novitiate with the Order of Friar Preachers (Dominicans) and had been clothed in the habit of the Order at the beginning of July.
I along with a fellow novice, Br Thomas Azzi, was heading to Hong Kong to enter into a joint novitiate program with the novices of the missionary Province of Our Lady of the Rosary.
We got off the plane about 9pm Hong Kong time, it was around 30 degrees and high humidity. We had left Queensland in the middle of winter, and arrived in the middle of a steamy Hong Kong summer.
Thankfully, I had lived and worked in Darwin, so I had some preparation for the level of heat and humidity in Hong Kong.
The novice master is from Spain from the Province of Our Lady of the Rosary.
There are 10 other novices besides, Br Thomas and myself. They all come from Burma (Myanmar).
Apart from all our novitiate activities and duties, they have spent a major part of the last six months scanning news items for information coming out of Burma about what is happening, to their homes, to the church and especially to family and friends.
We have visiting priests from all over the world. They often give us lectures about what is happening in the Church and the Order around the world especially in the growth in some areas and the persecution in others.
It is at times like these that I find myself comparing this information with what I know of the Church in Australia.
In Australia we are fortunate that we have the freedom to practice our faith, and while there may be some ‘hardships’, getting out of bed on a cold winters morning to go to Mass, or fasting prior to mass, we are not being called upon to offer our safety, our lives, to profess what we say is our faith.
We are not persecuted, excluded from jobs, or even imprisoned for saying ‘I believe’.
In some ways I wonder if not having to suffer or give things up for what we believe, we lose what it really means to us.
2 comments:
Br Karl, would you prefer your novitiate in Australia or Hong Kong, or what about the USA, I hear the Dominicans are pretty big over there?
Billy, Thank you for your question. It is hard to compare with the United States not knowing the set up there, but I think that for Br Thomas and I being in Hong Kong is a better option than if we had undertaken a Novitiate in Australia. Here we have a large Novititate group, and a house that is focused on our formation. In Australia, due to the size of province, we we be in a Parish and our formation would need to blend with that of the parish life and the availability of friars.
Yet again, thanks for the question and I hope my response has answered it for you.
Br Karl
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