[ music ] show's title indicates, a mosaic: where persons, families, and communities of many different races, languages, and hello and on behalf of the archdiocese of san francisco welcome to mosaic. san francisco in the bay area as our show title indicates, is a mosaic. where families and communities of different languages, and religions have come to live. the catholic church in san francisco has always responded towe rve 18immigrgrou and ics. o the first chinese came here from east and west, north and despite intolerance, discrimination and many difficulties they have endured,

thrived and contributed enormously. new waves of chinese continue to arrive today, to study, to work or stay permanently. today we will talk with father peter zaidi, a priest of the divine word society who directs the chinese archdiocese. to find out a little history, and perhaps. into the future. after this brief break priest join us base they should -- please join us for a conversation. [ music ]

hello and thank you for joining us on mosaic, our guest today is father peter zaidi. and he is director of chinese pastoral ministries. >> yes, i am director of chinese ministry here in arch diocese of san francisco . >> along of you been doing that work? >> for five years. >> and you live in the city ? >> yes, i live in the city, in st. anne of sunset. >> and that is one of six or seven parishes that have chinese mass ? >> yes, we have sunday mass, actually saturday at 12 pm.

>> is your mass in cantonese or mandarin? >> actually i am doing the mass and i only speak mandarin, when i came here. but i learned cantonese and now i celebrate mass in cantonese, and i preach in mandarin. i also learned how to preach a little bit in cantonese. >> your english is good and i've heard you preach but i haven't heard you preach in cantonese but what is the report? >> it works. elderly people do not understand mandarin so i speak to them in cantonese. and they say it's much better, they can understand now. >> i think that even we who sort of live here and know very little about the chinese community know that the major original chinese community were people who were cantonese speakers. >> that is correct. >> more and more of the immigrant or current community is becoming people from the mainland who speak mandarin. >> that is right. smack --

>> let me ask about yourself. >> i was born in central china in a province called inner mongolia. >> let me ask to bring up the slide, i think it is slide number one. it should be a map of china and if you can see up in the yellow on the top >> yes, that is where i was born, right in the middle of the yellow part, northwest of beijing. >> and you grew up there. born into a catholic family i'm told ? >> yes, i was born into a very catholic family. even though at the time, the church was all closed and we did not have priests or religious services. but my family held onto the faith and i was brought up as a true catholic. >> it seems to be that you got some training and discovered your vocation as a priest by

the aid of the divine works society. >> yes, from very young because my mother is very faithful, she wanted us to be religious priests or -- i have six siblings and she educated us in that way. so actually, when i was very young, my mother already asked me to pray for my vocation, my late mother, she passed away two years ago. so that is where i got my vocation, i prayed for it. when i grew up, i had the opportunity to get to know some missionaries in china. so i joined divine word missionaries. >> i looked at their website, i knew very little about them before meeting you but the divine word missionaries are a very large organization with 4000 priest,

2000 brothers, works in how many customers, 84 ? >> 84 countries now and we continue to grow. a few years ago we were in 72 countries but after three years we expanded. we added 12 countries. so we consist of people from different countries, different nationalities, so we are really, they say divine word missionaries is the only congregation growing in the catholic church. >> one of the few growing invocations. because many of their -- them are aging and they are not finding new members. do you attribute the growth to the potency of your -- >> yes, we are missionaries and so many people still are interested in missionary work, to bring the good news to others , so a lot of people want to

join us. also we are very international and inclusive, that is part of our kurt -- charisma. >> i read that you get cross- cultural training and i would say you are an example of that. you came and studied here in the united states. >> yes. >> and you got a degree in theology in chicago. >> yes. i studied first of all when i came here, i entered into the divine world -- divine word college. i started my philosophy there for four years and after graduating from there i went to ceu catholic theological union and studied for five years. >> let me ask you this, would foia? y you are a missionary to ch so i wod say yes.

>> you serve the chinese community because you have a built-in expertise in that, i imagine that your order could train you and send you to somewhere else, for instance their newest mission is our -- missions are in norway and burma. >> yes, we are very open to our church, in the societies where we are needed. so wherever there is a need we are trying to explore, we send missionaries into the area to work with local churches or to work with people who live there. >> i read that your mission to the poor includes the large immigrant and migrant groups circulating through the world . >> yes, because we are international, our missionary society can go to different countries to be with your own people, to evangelize right there, in a different country

but with your own people, just like in my case, for so many immigrants here in the bay area. so i have the advantage because i know the culture, i can work with people in that way, it is truly god's blessing for us. >> and we will come back after this brief break and talk more about the history and future of catholicism for the chinese. [ music ] [ cell phone rings ]

>> yeah, i'm watching it too. i see them every day. >> the curtains, they're always drawn in this place. >> i know. >> that guy, it seems like he's in charge of them. i don't know, i don't feel very good about this. >> we have to report this. >> yes, absolutely.

[ music ] hello and welcome back, as we mentioned there is a long history of chinese catholics in san francisco in the archdiocese of san francisco, and in fact the chinese population i believe in san francisco is about one in five of the population. >> right. >> we have a long history.

let me show you a couple of slides from the past, slide four and this is a chinese madonna at the chinese mission in san francisco in the 1920s. slide five, this is a 1940s famous drama and bellcore from st. mary's school which practiced for 70 or 80 years and was quite well known to us. the chinese in san francisco have had their difficulties, it seems to me that they are now fully assimilated, we have had historical things such as the first chinese bishop of san francisco and you have come to serve the chinese community here. can you tell us about it? what is it doing and what are your activities, what are the challenges? >> from the very beginning when the chinese immigrated here, our church really opened our

door to welcome all the immigrants. they had difficulties, especially in the beginning, it is really hard for them, for the church to find a catholic priest to serve them because not many priests are speaking chinese. but gradually, in the beginning of the 20th century, to establish a chinese mission, from that moment on, people really started to organize, and they started to evangelize. they opened a chinese school. so evangelization is always our goal for our church and we try to evangelize to bring christ into the population of chinese in the bay area in san francisco.

we have tried to revive, create some programs to really start to evangelize and build up the chinese community here. >> i notice, if we can show this slide again, i think this is slide 12, it would be the chinese catholic pastoral ministry homepage, it's a beautiful website full of activities and news and so on. i'm wondering who does the website for you? >> actually when i came here, and i knew that we would need a website, i got onto social media to evangelize, so actually i learned how to build a website. so i did it myself. >> well done ! >> it is beautiful but still in the process.

>> let me ask you, we can show this slide as well which i think is a very good slide, slide number 13. it is what you call your pastoral plan. >> yes, we started to think about how to do evangelization, how to build our community and so we had a meeting, i called all the leaders of the diocese, the chinese ministry, we had a meeting and we worked out chinese evangelization plans, so this is a partial plan. we already started the process. we have already appointed the leaders, so in that way we can create a lot of activities for all the catholic,we ve evangelization, our caa formation shows spiritual activities so we are creating that.

>> i see many activities and i wonder if it is attractive to the youth. it seems there is a large cohort of chinese youth that are active and interested in the faith. >> yes, there is a lot. we are going to build a youth program and actually just last month in july i organized one activity and because a lot of young chinese professionals that are working in san francisco. i organized a barbecue and a lot of people came. >> this is interesting. i think the chinese families in the bay area, like other families, are having fewer children. but there are more chinese immigration of foreign students in high schools and colleges, large groups of professionals. so you make connections with these as well? >> yes, we go to build the chinese campus ministry so we

just started, i hope we can reach out to those students in colleges and high school, and i have been invited to different high schools to give talks. so there are thirtysomething students in reordered in high school and thirtysomething students in notre dame high school. so i have been in that campus and talked with them about the faith and introduce them to jesus christ and church history. >> i know there is a faith formation conference which now has workshops in chinese. and i know that our pastoral ministry has workshops in chinese and there is more chinese literature he and so on. in our last minute of the segment could we bring up photos of let's say photos six

through 11 in order and rolled through them. to show some of the beauty that the chinese culture has provided for the catholic church. this liturgy we are going to see is in the cathedral and i believe it is chinese new year? >> yes. >> and this happens every year and we see masses in chinese, we have the bishop and others participating. and then there are chinese dancers, chinese decorations, a blessing of ancestors and so on. >> yes. >> let's see if i have called the photos up. >> since i came over and we is liturgy in local church, we wanted to show chinese culture in a bigger scale. that is why we moved this liturgy. >> it is quite beautiful. if we can roll through these

you get an idea of how gorgeous this is in the church. the priest in their vestments are usually the most beautiful part of a mass but on this day quite beautiful things were going on. a reverent prayer for the blessing of pastors, wonderful sermons, and the chinese choir. tell me about the good luck dragons, are they doing the right thing out there? >> yes it is a traditional dance, every chinese new year weise -- we celebrate with dragons or lions, to represent harmony between heaven and earth and between people and animals and among us. so it's a joyful celebration. >> that's quite beautiful. and you can see that whole thing live on our youtube on the catholic archdiocese youtube channel. wonderful to look at. we will take a brief break and be bacr our last segment with father peter zhai .

[ music ] hello and thanks for being with us with father peter zhai. i wanted to ask you a little bit about catholicism in china. your family was catholic in china, china has been seeing many missionaries over the past how many centuries? five centuries? >> actually the first missionary went to china in the eighth century.

so that is not catholic, and they were there to proclaim christ. that was very early, and in the 13th century missionaries from the west came into the country to proclaim the gospel. >> what i read and i think it's correct, basically statistically the christian population in china is growing. very rapidly. >> yes. >> people are interested in christianity, i think protestant is the entity is 80% maybe and catholic christianity is 10%, 20% or so. what do you make of this phenomenon? >> i think the chinese always are seeking spirituality and moral support in the family as a people. also, because christ's message

is very attractive to the culture itself. it people are really open to that great message that jesus brings to each of us. especially nowadays when people are materially satisfied. they have a deeper longing in the spiritual life in their heart. we are the where they can find meaning, when probably they were more focused on trying to survive and work for material goods. but now, people have that already. what is the next step? that is why the vast majority of chinese people, especially young people, they are in college and are very interested in seeking spiritual nourishment. >> there must be that hunger which doesn't die and i think you are right, i'm not sure that we in the west appreciate

how rapid the growth of the chinese economy has been, we hear about it but truly more and more middle-class, more people not in poverty and people as you say who have enough material things but want to know more about what life is about. very interesting. our catholic missionaries free to practice in china? >> yes. we now have some freedom but not totally. hopefully we can have that total freedom very soon. to bring gospel to the people and the message of love, hope and faith. >> and we are the next door to china here in california, it is just an ocean away so i no you make -- know you make connections with chinese catholics. >> yes, from time to hot -- time

we have retreats and we invite people from hong kong and thailand and from the mainland to the us retreat and there is a great connection between china and the church in china and here. >> and it is the catholic church which as you know is the greek word for universal. let me ask you, we have about a minute left. what would you like people to take away from this program? >> i would like to thank everybody and ask them to watch this program and to listen to my sharing and i would like to encourage everybody to pray especially for our church in china and that we have the freedom to worship very soon. and establish a formal relationship with america. and i also pray for all the missionaries, especially divine word missionaries who are working very hard to bring the

good news to others. and also, we want to get people involved in the chinese ministry. you do not have to be chinese. if you can pray for us, if you want to be supportive to us, to impact our chinese ministries in the archdiocese. they can phone you at the archdiocese or go to your website. >> that's right. >> and you could use people's help i suppose in your ministry. >> yes of course. >> as a last note i think i have read that the population of christians in china maybe 200 million in 10 or 15 years which would make it the largest tristan population in any country in the world. so the center of christianity is moving from the old european west to asia perhaps. father thank you very much for being here, thank you for

joining us and helping us talk about chinese catholics and the archdiocese of san francisco. [ music ]

live from the cbs bay area studios, this is kpix 5 news. >> elon musk reaches a settlement with the feds, the deal that has the tesla ceo paying a hefty price. plus an fbi investigation now underway into the sexual assault allegations against supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh. and two cracks on two beams, what is the fate of the san francisco transit center a deputy director gives us , go m >> let's start off with a look at the forecast. julie watts writer with us with some rain news. >> that's right, we have a little rain right now up north, not going to see much of it, it probably w