A Catholic-run center in the Japanese capital Tokyo that has cared for immigrants and refugees for more than three decades has pledged to foster “multicultural coexistence” between people of different ethnic backgrounds. This was reported by the Vatican news agency Fides on March 11.
Pastoral care of the needs of immigrants has always been a challenge for the Church, explained Filipino priest and director of the Catholic International Center of Tokyo (CTIC), Edwin D. Corros.
“The community of foreign Catholics poses an additional challenge to the local Church, which must also preserve Japanese Catholic identity.” noted the priest, who belongs to the Missionary Society of San Carlos Borromeo, also known as Scalabrina Missionaries.
The center was founded in 1990 to provide pastoral care to immigrants and refugees in Tokyo, on the centenary of the founding of the Diocese of Tokyo.
According to Fides Agency, the organization was reorganized in 2008 when the number of immigrant Catholics in Japan gradually surpassed native Catholics.
The center is now an apostolate of service to immigrants and refugees, as well as a starting point for pastoral care and support for foreigners.
Let us remember that the Catholic Church in Japan has about 450,000 native Catholics and about 500,000 Catholics from different countries in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe.
“Immigrants and refugees are often seen as troublemakers in the places they move to. Pope Francis dares to call them “men and women in search of peace”CTIC board president Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo said in a statement.
Our Church wants to share this journey with all travelers, “because God, the giver of life, speaks with love and mercy to all travelers,” added Kikuchi, president of Caritas Internationalis, a global confederation of Catholic charities.
According to Korros, today the center has two main missions: to support parishes in creating multicultural and inclusive communities and to promote the proclamation of Christ and evangelization among non-Japanese.
In Tokyo, Catholic parishes conduct services and celebrate the sacraments in a variety of languages, including German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Tagalog (Filipino).
The Center also accompanies and supports immigrants and their families individually in solving the problems they face in daily life, and provides assistance to needy families in cases of poverty, illness or incarceration.
Korros said that as Japan prioritizes receiving immigrants to address demographic problems caused by falling birth rates and a growing elderly population, the Church is helping foreign immigrants better integrate into society.
Although the Japanese Church is a small minority and its religious experience is influenced by Buddhism and Shintoism, the Church tries to preserve the “Japanese Catholic identity,” the priest stressed.
Multicultural coexistence based on unity in Christ Jesus is always a “common effort,” he added.
According to the US State Department’s 2022 World Religious Freedom Report, Japan had a population of 124.2 million.
Source: Rossa Primavera
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