A Jesuit Bartender

Over the years I have heard of priests serving as bartenders and was not surprised to hear we have a Jesuit who is doing just that in a cafe in our diocese. This priest gave an account of this in an article that I would like to summarize.

He was taking his studies for the priesthood in Australia where his own Jesuit Superior was serving at the tables at the house in which he was staying. Another experience at that time, the abbot at the Trappist Monastery in which he was staying was also setting up the tables and serving. Seeing this kept the dream that he had of doing that after ordination to the priesthood.

Our Lord shared many meals with others and after these meals something good always happened. The Jesuit wanted to welcome others as God welcomes us and the place that he could do this was a cafe. He mentioned our Lord was considered a wine drinker; to be noticed as such meant that he spent a great deal of time in table fellowship. Jesus was always welcoming and this was the example that motivated him to start his cafe. He called it: Window on life. This translation of the name may not have the nuance of the original, hopefully it will have the meaning.

Those who come to the cafe know that he is a priest which means it does not take long to get into a serious conversation about things that are important. He can talk about joy and sadness of life, frustrations, desires, and also the anger. When he shares their joy he is doubly joyful when they talk about their problems they can be lighten by the very sharing.

The life of a priest is serving . He serves the Eucharist to those that attend Mass and goes to the sick to serve them with the Eucharist.

There are many times when the Catholics who come find it difficult to have a priest serving them and they help out in bringing food and drink to those present. He tells them that they should allow themselves to be served this is also virtue.

There are many ways of trying to do mission. To bring the love of Christ to all is the heart of mission and running a cafe is a way to do this in a very unique way. May the work be blessed.

The Demonstrating Students

A post taken from Fr. Roman Theisen's People I Love.

"Americans go home! Down with the Yankee imperialism!" young women shouted as they waved placards and paraded back and forth. A student demonstration was going on at the front of the Sacred Heart College for Women. This College was in the new Parish of Yoi Kok 2 Dong where I was assigned. The Religious of the Sacred Heart who ran this College loaned me their College Chapel for Saturday afternoon and Sunday Masses until we could build a Parish Church.

It was Saturday afternoon and I was on my way to say the children's Mass when I ran into a student demonstration blocking my way to the College grounds. I was tempted to turn around and go home rather than confront the crowd and push my way through the shouting students.

But I needn't have worried. As I neared the gate the students respectfully lowered their placards and stopped their clamor, stepped back to make a path for me , and bowed as I walked by. Several called out "We're sorry. We apologize." When I was safely inside they raised their placards and resumed shouting "Americans go home!"

They had made it clear that however much they were against certain policies of the American Government they held no animosity towards individual Americans.

The New Way of Family Life in Korea.

The traditional family structure in Korea has weakened and in many cases broken down in the past few decades. We are seeing nuclear families and a great deal of divorce in our Korean Society. Part of this is the secularization and globalization that is taking place throughout the world. The good is that there is much more of an equality in family relations and an improvement in the status of women but it is doing havoc with many families.

In the small community in which I am in residence there are only 6 children who are part of our

Sunday School program, all of which are from broken families. The sons married and with the failure of the marriage, divorced, and sent the children to the homestead to live with the grandparents. The fathers do remarry but find it difficult, in most cases, to bring the children to the new marriage. Many of the mothers do not seem interested in the children, for they also want to remarry; without the children it is much easier. In most cases it is understood that the children stay with the father. This is the predicament that many of the families have to face. If the grandparents are healthy this difficulty, at times, can be surmounted but in most cases the children suffer a great deal and it is easily seen in their faces.

Just as in the west both the parents usually have to work. The traditional Korean family where all would be living under the same roof is disappearing. The norm is the sons leave the homestead and move to the city to find work and start a family. This seems to be the choice of all concerned. The farming families continue working without the sons and this lack is made up with modern day farming machinery.

There is also the case of grandmothers who live alone. They prefer at times to live away from the sons , for the freedom that it gives; they do not want to be a burden but poverty, at times, is also part of the picture. These woman have a difficult time for they have to do all the work and take care of the upkeep of the house but it is apparently easier on them then to live in the restricted atmosphere of family.

It doesn't take long for a society to change the way things are done and part of the reason for this is what they see and hear both in Korea and from the the rest of the world.

The Couple Who Married... with a Picture

One of the stories by Fr, Roman Theisen taken from the People I love.

"Could we arrange a marriage in the Church? None of us are Catholic." The speaker was a man about 40 years old. His question made me smile. Just a short time before, as member of a commission appointed by the Korean Bishops to draw up a directory for pastoral work in Korea, I had persuaded the the Bishops to allow non-Catholic marriages in the Churches of Korea, provided neither party had a divorce or any impediment of natural law.

"You see, Father," the man explained:"my parents were too poor to have a marriage ceremony with a picture. They just registered their marriage according to civil law. Then they had to support me and my six brothers and sisters. They always felt bad they had no picture of their wedding to show us as we grew up. Now my father's 60th birthday is coming up and we want to chip in and pay for a marriage ceremony for them. If its not too expensive, a real marriage... with a picture."

I assured them it wouldn't be too expensive. There were three wedding dresses at the Church and if one fit his mother they wouldn't even have to rent a wedding gown.

The Lord blessed the Wedding Day with a bright sun, and the bride was radiant with happiness, walking down the aisle to meet her groom of 40 years. Young women of the choir sang and the grandchildren played in the aisle as the couple promised to love and cherish each other. After the ceremony I stood with them before the altar as the local photographer took a picture.

Bride and groom smiled happily as they left the Church, surrounded by their seven children and numerous grandchildren. They were really married now... with a picture!

Decorating the Parish Church

One of the professors from the School of Art in the Diocese was invited to help in the remodelling of a parish Church. As he entered the parish grounds he noticed a number of statues of the Blessed Mother in different parts of the parish courtyard. "Father why in the world do you have so many statues of the Blessed Mother out in the yard?" To the question the parish priest answered that he asked for a donation for a statue and 5 parishioners, who could not be persuaded otherwise, left him with this problem of conscience. He couldn't give the statues away and could not destroy them, so the predicament.


In Korea the Protestants have difficulty with statues and crucifixes for they see them as images that are prohibited from their reading of the Old Testament. The Catholics have heard this but pay little attention. You also see at times a statue of Jesus or Mary on the top of a church building that turns to different parts of the parish. The professor of art would not see a difficulty with using statues and images but the place and surroundings should be considered in their placement.


In conclusion he reflects that we are influenced concretely with the connection we have with time and space. The images that we see affect the mind and heart that we do not see. No matter how good the image is, it can never express the reality that we want to see. That is why we have to be very careful with our images. That is true, he says for the images that we have outside the Church but more so for the images that we have in the church.


We should not attempt he says to decorate the Church in the way we decorate our homes. The Church is the place where we keep the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord is the master there, present in silence and in word those of us working pastorally, he concludes, should always remember this.

She Never Heard of Jesus

From the People I Love by Roman Theisen.M.M. (Incident took place in 1990)

Miss. Lee met us at the airport in Shanghai, China. She would be our official guide for the next 15 days. We were meeting officials in the Korean speaking region of North East China to discuss an invitation for Maryknoll Missioners to teach English in Universities there. Our itinerary included important tourist spots, such as the Great Wall and the archaeological sites of Xian, as well as sites sacred to us, including the chapel in Shanghai where the first Korean priest, St. Andrew Kim, was ordained in 1845.

As we toured China we visited seminaries and Churches of the Catholic Patriotic Association, the government supervised portion of the Catholic Church which has no contact with Rome. Both we and the Patriotic Association leaders were careful to obey Chinese law, which allowed us to say Mass privately in these Churches, but never in public. One site of great significance to me was the cemetery in Beijing in which are found remains of Father Matteo Ricci and other great Jesuit missionaries of the early 1600s. Their memorials are protected in the "back yard " of an official Communist office building.

Miss Lee continued to observe closely everything we did and said, and even attended our Masses. She impressed us as a highly intelligent and well educated woman. I was surprised when she approached me one day with a question that troubled her. "Who," she asked, "is this Jesus Christ? Is he a leader in your Church and does he live in America? And the Apostle Paul whose title I saw carved on one of the Churches as 'Apostle to the Nations'... Is he like your Foreign Minister? And does he live in America, too?"

I explained to her who Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul is. It was the only time in my career as a missionary that I've had the privilege of proclamining the Good new of Jesus Christ to someone who had absolutely never heard of Him before.

Miss Lee stayed with us until we finally boarded a boat of Panamanian registry at Weihai on the northern coast of China, for an overnight voyage over the Yellow Sea to the P0rt of Inchon, Korean . Out trip to China had been successful We now have four Maryknoll priests teaching in the Korean speaking Universities of North East China. (formally called Manchuria. )

Decrepit Old Men

The following is a incident retold by Fr. Roman Theisen in his booklet "People I Love".

As the three elderly men walked away, one with a slight limp the young Sister who was with me asked: "Who are those decrepit old men?" She had seen me invite them for coffee and walk with them to the gate. "Those are living martyrs of the Korean Church." I told her.

On June 25, 1950, the communist army of the North invaded South Korea, and sent millions of refugees pouring from the North into South Korea. Women and children were stopped at the bridges and train stations; young men of military age escaped on boats and trains to the South, remaining behind they would be conscripted in the North Korean Army, coming to the South they were conscripted into the South Korean Army.

When the fighting stopped and the Bamboo Curtain stabilized at the 38th parallel in 1953, dividing North and South Korea, these men were caught in the South and their wives and children sealed off in the North. As they were released from the Army the Catholic men, faced a cruel predicament. In Korea these men would find it very difficult to survive without their wives. Loyal Catholics, presuming their wives survived in the North could not remarry.

One of the priests invited such men to join him in a religious Brotherhood. As Religious Brothers they remained faithful to their wives in the North and at the same time supported themselves as carpenters, farmers, or by whatever occupation they had before the War. They were called the Brothers of the Korean Martyrs. Over thirty men joined him. When they petitioned for approval as a religious congregation Rome refused saying they must eventually return to their wives in the North.

When I started a parish in Kan Sek Dong the Brothers lent us their monastery chapel for Sunday Mass until we built our church. I was appointed to be their Confessor. I got to know these men. Since I was assigned elsewhere these Brothers would come several times a year for confession and spiritual direction. Several have died. Four of them left the Brotherhood and married, after I investigated the circumstances of their wives in North Korea and concluded that they must be presumed dead. Eight of the Brothers still visit me. Tired old men now largely forgotten by the Korean Church, somewhat looked down upon by the younger recruits to their Brotherhood, they continue to say their morning and night prayers together and work long hours on their farm. It has been an honor to know them.