The New Korea

In the Catholic Peace Weekly Eyes of the Clergy Column, the priest columnist gives his opinion on a serious situation experienced presently by Korean society. 

Korea was a country where 1 million newborns were born every year. However, in 2002, the number of births was halved to 490,000. In just one generation, it was reduced to half that of the parents' generation. Now, it is cut in half again, and the number of births in 2022 is 240,000. Exactly every generation that passes, the population of the parents' generation is decreasing by half. Korea's rapid population decline, which is surprising to the world, is creating a new Republic of Korea that has never been experienced before.

Military units are disappearing. According to the Defense Reform released by the Ministry of National Defense in 2018, the standing force of 600,000 will be gradually reduced to 500,000 by 2022. This is because there are no soldiers to fill the unit. Accordingly, the Army's 27th Division stationed in Gangwon-do was disbanded. The disbandment of the division led to the disappearance of the community in the area where the unit was located. Local commercial districts are collapsing regardless of industry, and the number of school students, most of whom are children of military personnel, is plummeting. As the number of students plummets, the quality of education deteriorates, and the vicious cycle of people moving to new departments continues.

The decrease in students does not only occur in Gangwon-do. Closed schools also appeared in downtown Seoul. Dobong High School in Seoul will close in February. This is the first time for a general high school. The closure of elementary and middle schools in Seoul has already begun, and now even general high schools in Seoul are closing. The playground has been converted into a parking lot, and the school building will be remodeled and used as a government office. Although the number of kindergartens is decreasing, the number of senior day care centers, known as ‘senior kindergartens’, is steadily increasing.

Churches are also decreasing. The Protestant Church feels the crisis caused by population decline and is responding. According to the ‘2023 Status of Korean Religion’ report released by the Ministry Data Research Institute on January 16, it is predicted that Protestants in Korea will account for only 12% of the total population in 10 years. The cause is population decline and leaving the church. Some pastors within the Protestant church even argued for preparing to become a religious minority. 

Foreigners are taking up the positions vacated due to population decline. Local universities, where mass admission shortages occur, are filling their ranks with foreign students to maintain their universities. The national flags of many nations fly over the campus, and the wine shops in front of the schools, which used to sell makgeolli, are now ‘little Itaewons’ for international students. It has become a daily occurrence to meet international students serving people at restaurants with poor Korean. Is it just local universities? Industries that require hard labor, whether agriculture, manufacturing, construction, or service, are now paralyzed without foreign workers.

What is happening in society is happening in the Catholic Church. Foreign workers were the biggest help in restoring a parish church in Pohang, which was damaged by floods from a typhoon last year. On a day when a Mass for Filipinos is offered, the front of Hyehwa-dong church in Seoul is crowded with Filipinos. Parishes in areas with a high rate of foreign residents, such as Dongducheon Parish in Uijeongbu Diocese, prepare and offer separate Masses for immigrants. Moreover, 100 Filipino domestic helpers (housekeeping managers) will come to Korea as part of the ‘Foreign Domestic (Childcare) Workforce’ pilot project being prepared by the Seoul Metropolitan Government this year. The number of foreigners among us is expected to increase.

Because of the population decline the Church needs to accommodate to the new reality. In particular, pastoral care for the increasing number of immigrants is urgent. Rather than viewing immigrants as people who need help, we must recognize them as partners. Moreover, preparing pastoral alternatives for immigrants must begin with listening to their voices. If we listen to their voices and take a sensitive and warm approach to immigrants individually, we may encounter a synod church that ‘walks together’.

Finding Serenity In Life

On the Here And Now, Catholic Website a diocesan priest gives us his thoughts on using 100 percent of your strength all the time. We are all familiar with the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. The writer gives us his solution to arriving at serenity.

In the article, he mentions the opinion that came to mind from an article he remembers from the past.  According to the priest author, we cannot live by giving 100% of our strength all the time. If you do that, it won't be long before you give up. Therefore, you usually live with 80% of your strength, but when you need 100% of your strength, you use that strength, and when the work is finished, you go back to 80%.

Whether we know it or not, we were asked to always do our best from a young age. He doesn't know how it is these days, but when he was young, the goal of all elementary school kids was Seoul National University. At that time, to get into Seoul National University, you had to be in the top 1 percent, but with a competition rate of 100 to 1, how much effort would you have to put in to become that number 1? Naturally, all children were forced to study hard and did not think it was strange. 

At that time, we did not know how unfair and unreasonable it was to demand that every child be one in a hundred. He remembers a girl in 5th grade who put her head down on her desk and cried when her homeroom teacher berated her for getting a zero in her graded test papers. 

The demand to always do your best was not limited to studying. In Korean society, where college admissions and jobs are determined based on grades, the stereotype that poverty is due to not studying hard makes us feel bitter. It is a very big aspect of an unhealthy society that good performance in national affairs determines the future level of the economy. This is a social ill that must be fixed, but since this problem is directly connected to very strong vested interests, it is probably the most difficult problem to fix after the real estate problem.

With a father, mother, and older brother who graduated from Seoul National University, he was not poor at studying, but he could not enter Sky University. (The SKY abbreviation is the first letters of the names of South Korea's most respected universities: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University).

Fortunately, his parents were not too concerned about grades, and he became a priest, a way of life that was even less concerned with grades. However, more and more was always attached to his belief system, which had a strong desire for recognition. He continued to need a better ‘me’ than what he had presently achieved. When he entered the seminary, at some point he came to the realization that becoming a better me, would not bring satisfaction and only served to occasionally call me back to keep moving forward. There was no way he could properly understand the request to accept himself as he was, which is the first condition for happiness. He didn't really know what that meant. What does it mean to accept things as they are?

In fact, it was only after 20 years since he became a priest that he became aware of the meaning of ‘as it is’ to a certain extent, and now knows that it will take a long time to truly realize it. This is because knowledge about it belongs to experiential knowledge. In other words, it is a knowledge that can only be understood by experiencing it yourself and living it—  relying on the Lord. It is impossible for someone who has not done the training to explain this to others. That's because they have not gone through the process.

Anyway, without understanding the expression “just as you are,” which he encountered as a seminarian, his goal of becoming a good priest was connected to a desire to do more things well, and he ended up trying to do too well regardless of his capabilities. If you live with these thoughts, you will not have much leisure in life and will become frustrated. In short, it's because you're trying to use 100% of your strength the whole time, but the real problem is that this doesn't produce the best results. Let's think about it. Have you ever seen someone who always does their best in life? Personally, he hasn't met anybody yet. When we think of ourselves as people who do our best, we don't just look at working hard at the tasks given to us. 

The admonition to always do our best in everything leads us to impossible goals and ultimately leaves us discouraged. He thinks the true wisdom is to live your daily life with 80% of your strength and to distinguish when you need to exert 100% of your strength. When we try to reach an impossible goal, we often experience situations where we fail, so we always feel a sense of disconnection. The satisfaction or reward that comes with this does not last long, and you end up feeling stressed because you always feel like you are not good enough. You think more about what you did poorly than what you did well, and you become sensitive to mistakes.  In the end, your overall life energy becomes depleted as you age, and you may fall into workaholism or other addictions.

Everyone has a desire to do well, so it's natural to have that kind of desire, but trying to do too well is bound to be unreasonable, as it means always wanting to give 100 percent. There is a saying that moderate tension brings good results, and I think this is possible with an 80% mindset. This is because the remaining 20% includes the mindset of accepting our shortcomings, limitations, and mistakes that inevitably occur. When this happens, leisure comes into our lives and we can accept our shortcomings as they are, allowing us to see others the same way. How bleak would it be in a place that does not tolerate mistakes? 

God the Father, whom we believe in and follow, does not always demand 100 percent from us. There are times when you have to give 100 percent, but never always. However, this does not mean that 80% of daily lives are lived in moderation. And even if you put in 100% of your energy and the results are not as good as you hoped, the accepting attitude will be over 80 percent.

The Oldest Korean Neighbor—China

The Catholic Times column Building Bridges by a religious brother of the Taizé Community gives us some understanding of the overseas Chinese living in Korea for many generations.

Dam Anyu is a third-generation Chinese native living in Seoul. She graduated from Hanseong Chinese Elementary School in Myeong-dong and a Chinese Middle and High School. She said that her grandfather, who came to Korea by ship from Shandong Province in the 1940s, always taught Anyu: “You are Chinese,” and  emphasized: “When she grows up, she must not marry a Korean.”  He married a Korean from  Jeonju her grandmother. Her father was a teacher at an overseas Chinese school and then became a university professor.

The establishment of diplomatic relations between Korea and China in 1992 was a shock to many Chinese. One day, Korea suddenly established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party of China, and severed diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan), which is called 'Free China'. Anyu vividly remembers the day when the Taiwan flag was lowered for the last time at the Chinese elementary school she attended. (The Blue Sky with a White Sun is the national emblem of the Republic of China (Taiwan). She was very sad. However, most of the Chinese in Korea, many of whom are from Shandong Province, maintained their Republic of China nationality even after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Korea and China. 

After graduating from high school, she entered Taiwan's prestigious National Normal University, where she was shocked again. To Taiwanese people, she was Korean. No matter how much she emphasized, “I’m just like you,” as she waved her passport, the next time they met, she was introduced as “a friend from Korea”. China where my ancestors lived, Korea where I was born and lived, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) engraved on my passport. She didn't belong anywhere and seemed to be floating somewhere in the West Sea.

When she became a Christian as a college student, she discovered a new identity as a child of God. But when she returned to Seoul and started her master's studies, she was introduced as an international student and even served as an international student representative. As she enters the doctoral program at Yonsei University this spring, she may once again be treated as an international student at the school, which is a short walk from her home.

Koreans do not know much about their ‘oldest neighbors’, the Chinese. We know about the Koreans who sacrificed their lives in Japan during the Great Kanto Earthquake, but the massacre of Chinese people that took place in Pyongyang in 1931 after the Wanbo Mountain Incident is not taught anywhere. He only found out about it recently.

The Park Chung-hee regime's ban on land ownership remained a trauma for many ethnic Chinese. A cabbage seller lost his land and started a restaurant, but the price of Jjajangmyeon was determined by the government and he could not raise it at will. Currency reform was also a blow to overseas Chinese who had a lot of cash. When Kim Young-sam government implemented the real-name financial system, some people lost their property and friends. Due to various restrictions and discriminatory treatment, the number of ethnic Chinese who at one time was close to 100,000 decreased to 20,000. 

Korea is already an internationally recognized multi-ethnic country. The number of foreigners residing in the country is close to 5 percent. When will Dam An-yu, a native of Yeonhui-dong, be seen as our oldest neighbor and considered ‘one of us’?

Perception Changes What We See

In the Diagnoses of the Times Column of the Catholic Peace Weekly, a member of the Reconciliation Committee gives us his opinion on the situation with the North.

Since the beginning of the year, the confrontation between North and South Korea has been intensifying in words and actions. At the 9th Plenary Meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman Kim Jong-un said in his speech: "In case of emergency, we must continue to accelerate preparations for a great action to pacify the entire territory of South Korea by mobilizing all physical means and capabilities, including nuclear force."  Of course, there was a caveat that “a nuclear crisis could occur in the event of an emergency,” but the media reported that North Korea could prepare for a war that would pacify all of South Korea through nuclear war. When paying attention to the conditional clause in Chairman Kim Jong-un's remarks, the media reports seemed to emphasize the impression that North Korea had decided to prepare for nuclear war, even though the possibility of nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula could be controlled if a crisis threatening the system did not occur. Of course, this does not mean that this remark is light or something we can tolerate. No matter how conditional clauses are added on the Korean Peninsula, we firmly oppose any statement that heightens the possibility of war between South and North Korea. However, putting the blame for the conflict only on one party does not help ease tensions. There is a need to closely analyze what North Korea wants to say.

Not only words but also concrete military actions are increasing anxiety. On January 5, North Korea fired some 200 artillery shells into waters off its western coast along the Military Demarcation Line in the West Sea but no damage was caused to our military or civilians, and most of the shells fell within the northern buffer zone of the Northern Limit Line. Our military immediately fired back, and residents of the five islands in the West Sea, including Yeonpyeong Island, were told to move to nearby shelters. Of course, passenger ships traveling between Incheon and Baengnyeong Island were also controlled. 

In recent years, the media has poured out articles criticizing North Korea, saying that it stopped firing coastal artillery on the west coast and then suddenly carried out a military “provocation.” However, before that, on January 1, the Korean Army carried out K-9 self-propelled artillery shelling in the Cheorwon area, and on the 2nd, artillery and armored units moved on the Eastern and Western Fronts. On January 3, the Navy conducted maritime maneuvers throughout the east, west, and south, and there was combat shooting by the ROK-US combined forces for seven days from December 29 of last year. And the media described all of this as “training.”

According to experts, the prevailing analysis is that North Korea's coastal artillery fire on the West Sea is in response to our military's actions. It was not seen as a sudden “provocation” by North Korea when there was no provocation but as a response to our military’s “training.” However, the media did not sufficiently analyze our side's previous movements and only emphasized North Korea's coastal artillery fire. Of course, it is natural that our military's training does not become news, but North Korea's military actions do. However, describing all of North Korea's military actions as provocations in media reports also puts the blame on only one party. This is not seeing the situation as it exists.

The current reality on the Korean Peninsula is that one side's actions, whether words or actions provoke a response from the other side. The words and actions of the North and South are naturally directed at the other. However, the perception is that our side's words and actions are defensive and legitimate military "training", while the other side's offensive and reprehensible military "provocations", clearly show the entrenched conflict situation. In a conflict situation, a mechanical schema is activated in which the in-group is good and the victim, but the opposition is bad and the perpetrator. However, not all actions can be expressed as provocations. Rather, it is expressed as “low-intensity military action” or “high-intensity military action,” and the conflict can be managed only when objective judgment and analysis are made. If you look at the other person with fixed eyes and that is all you see the situation will not change. Wouldn't correcting our perspectives and expressions in conflict situations be the first step to realizing peace?

Sensitivity to Diverse Families

 

A university professor in the humanities department gives the readers of The View from the Ark of the Catholic Times a look at the Korean Family.

We often interpret family as a group made up of marriage, blood, and adoption. The modern nuclear family is a family consisting of a husband and wife and their children. This family is interpreted as universal and ideal. However, the family is not static but has been changing, and in Korean society, the nuclear family is not the majority.

The Korean nuclear family is different from the Western nuclear family, where people become independent from their parents as adults. Adult children tend to have a strong bond with their parents. When parents and children do not have a good relationship, they are unable to exchange care or financial support, and poor families are vulnerable to social structures in society. Even if the nuclear family form is maintained, a mixed form with extended family has been maintained because the relationship with elderly parents is important. In addition, they placed great importance on the relationship between children and elderly parents for the care of the elderly is a child's filial duty.

However, children live independently after marriage, and elderly parents live as single-family households or as single-person households. The perception that not directly caring for sick elderly parents or entering a nursing home means being unfilial or being abandoned by one's children is also changing. Additionally, even if a family member takes care of the child, they are supported by the nursing care system. Nevertheless, family care responsibilities are still important, and those who take care of them are mainly women.

As of 2024, the form of the Korean family is becoming more and more diverse. The number of single-person households is increasing across all age groups, and the number of dual-income couples without children is also increasing. In cases where three generations live together, the purpose is to support child care for children of dual-income couples rather than for elderly parents to receive care. Nevertheless, women sometimes stop their careers after giving birth to children and live the life of a full-time housewife, or later find employment in menial jobs or care-related jobs.

Women who fear losing their work and independence by dedicating themselves to caring and marriage choose not to marry, are at times criticized as selfish women. Although women's higher education has increased, work is interpreted as not being as important to women as it is to men, and the breadwinners are still men.

A happy family is a relationship in which family members share economic interests and emotional support. Single-person households may form relationships with companion animals or live alone and maintain relationships through loose solidarity with other people. The choice to focus on one's work and life cannot be criticized as selfish. Most married men are too busy working to spend much time with their families, but they are not accused of being selfish. The reason they can maintain a family is because they have a wife who is a full-time housewife who is devoted to the family.

People who value family values think of the nuclear family as a normal family and may be prejudiced against families that are not part of the nuclear family. Pity is at times no different from forms of discrimination by the privileged. In a marriage, respecting and considering each other is important. However, there are also families whose parents have passed away or who cannot live with their parents. 

The professor had a friend in college who never talked about her family. That's because that friend's father died when she was young. Later, her friends felt sorry for talking immaturely about their parents in front of her. There was no reason why that friend couldn't talk about her family to her heart's content. However, the image of a happy family had put a burden on the friend.

Children who receive nurturing, and financial support and feel the love of their parents, are more likely to live emotionally stable lives. However, people who grow up in families where this is not the case are not necessarily unhappy. Children from poor families, divorced families, or single-parent families can become more independent and mature in overcoming their difficulties. However, She hopes that acquaintances, neighbors, and churches will break away from prejudices towards these families— seeing them as deficient and problem families and become role models for them and become communities of empathy and care.

The Church on Pilgrimage

In the View from the Ark column of the Catholic Times, a pastor reminds us that we are members of a Church on pilgrimage and what this requires. 

 "Joy and hope (Gaudium et spes), sorrow and anguish, of modern society, especially of all poor and suffering people, are the joy and hope, sorrow and anguish of Christ's disciples. There is nothing truly human that does not touch the hearts of believers. This is because the community of Christ's disciples comprises humans. Gathered in Christ, they were guided by the Holy Spirit on their journey toward the Kingdom of God the Father and accepted the news of salvation that was to be proclaimed to all people. Therefore, the community of Christ's disciples experiences its close connection to humanity and human history" (Second Vatican Council Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, paragraph 1).

The Second Vatican Council declares that the church is a 'pilgrimage church'. This means that the church is not separate from the world, but rather exists within the world and must play the role of light and salt of the world through the pilgrimage journey to the heavenly home. The statement in the Constitution on Pastorals that "the community of Christ’s disciples is closely bound up with humanity and human history" reminds us of how much attention the church must pay to the affairs of the world, and indeed to the affairs of fellow human beings. However, since the way human affairs are carried out is 'politics', how can the church, a community of Christ's disciples, not be interested in politics?

"Every day human interdependence grows ever closer and increasingly spreads across the world, the common good – the sum of the conditions of social life that enable groups and individual members to pursue self-perfection more fully and more easily –  It came to contain rights and obligations related to all mankind. Any group must take into account the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups and, moreover, the common good of the entire human family (Article 26 of the Pastoral Constitution).

Article 28 of the Constitution on Pastoral Care states:

"We must respect and love even those who think and act differently from us in social, political, and religious matters. "The more we truly understand their way of thinking with kindness and love, the easier it is to communicate with them."

However, there is something you should not mistake here! ‘We’ in the statement in paragraph 28 refers to ‘the church’, the community of Christ’s disciples. In other words, if we are Christians, it is strongly assumed that we are people who live according to the teachings of the Council. This means that those who live with the name ‘Christ’ in their hearts should understand and try to live this.  

Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Article 1903).

Despite this church teaching, if a Christian reading this is uncomfortable with the political participation of a priest who is part of the community of Christ's disciples, he should simply pray for his repentance rather than curse or condemn him. Because that is the teaching of the church.

"A distinction must be made between errors and those who commit them. Errors must always be rejected, but even those who commit errors always retain human dignity, even if they hold wrong or inaccurate religious concepts. God alone is the judge and searcher of hearts; for that reason, He forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone. (Article 28 of the Pastoral Constitution).

Learning Mindfulness

In the Catholic Times Sunday Chat Column, a psychological counselor introduces us to the concept of mindfulness and how she feels it may be helpful to the readers in getting order into our often hectic lives. 

The Buddhists and many religions have made mindfulness a powerful procedure in their teaching and Catholics have expressed this way of life as Agere quod Agis, the Latin phrase (Do what you are doing).

We are exposed to a galore of self-help procedures, some not helpful, others bothersome, some not now, some make a lot of sense, and many we have heard about over the years expressed differently, putting them in our mental storehouse for mulling is all for the good. 

The columnist begins by expressing a desire to complain to God if it was permissible to do so. This would be her first prayer for the New Year. Even though the year was filled with regret, she also feels that God gave her a fair chance for a new start, and secretly dreams of changes in her life.

Her biggest goal in the new year is to be more mindful. ‘Mindfulness’ refers to ‘the attitude of paying attention and noticing what is happening here, now, as it is.’ Jon Kabat-Zinn developed meditation beyond a specific religious practice and into a tool that everyone can use to train their minds and founded MBSR (Mindfullness-Based Stress Reduction). Regarding mindfulness, which is enjoying a worldwide craze, he says, ‘It is not about changing yourself, but about recognizing your own nature moment by moment'.

Faced with this explanation, many people ask, ‘What on earth is mindfulness?’ This is an age where it is a virtue to place a high value on what is clearly revealed right before our eyes and to urge us to reach a quick conclusion.

In that case, she says: ‘Just try it.’ Mindfulness should be approached as an experience rather than as a theory. Passing through moments when things don't seem to be going well is the path to mindfulness.

Again, the question is asked: what lies at the end of the road? Actually, she doesn't know yet. However, she would like to walk further on that path. She is trying to put down her smartphone just for a moment and experience the real world rather than the virtual world more vividly for a moment.

Out of 24 hours a day, how much time do you spend scrolling aimlessly and staring blankly at your smartphone? Have you ever felt sad and devastated because time flew by without you even knowing what you were doing? If you want something different in the new year, she can confidently say that mindfulness is the answer.

These days, she is trying mindfulness meditation with her clients (those receiving counseling). Mindfulness recommends turning back less to the doing mode and more to the being mode. Nowadays, we see many things in our society that are too lopsided and unbalanced. So too is the weight between modes of doing and modes of being. We are so busy living each day that we may be stamping our feet in confusion without knowing where to turn. Stop for a moment and just be still. That could be the beginning of mindfulness.

If the phrase ‘Mindfulness?’ with a question mark is added to your notes, and it leads to the thought of ‘Should I buy a book about it?’, she thinks her first diary of the new year will be full of meaning with that much sharing. So, the first line of her New Year’s goal is 'My mindfulness'. The second line is 'Your mindfulness'.