Singapore, an Asian crossroads for the Catholic Church

From September 11 to 13, 2024, Pope Francis will visit Singapore, the final stop on his tour of Asia and Oceania. In this city of exchanges, a key hinge of Southeast Asia, the Pontiff will be able to emphasize the importance of its missionary — but also Chinese — roots and its “harmony” in the interreligious sphere.

In 2020, Pope Francis abandoned a planned trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania because of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, only one of the four countries the Pontiff is now visiting was not mentioned: Singapore. While it’s possible that this stopover had already been considered by Rome — the city-state had sent the Pontiff an official invitation shortly beforehand — it nonetheless stands out from the other three.

Unlike the other countries on this visit’s itinerary — Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor — Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world (8th highest GDP/capita according to the IMF in 2021). Also known as the “Switzerland of Asia” for its neutrality, Singapore is a predominantly urban state, with an economy based on finance and lacking in raw materials. 

Singapore’s Catholic community is small for the region, with fewer than 400,000 faithful, compared with over two million in Papua New Guinea, over one million in East Timor, and almost eight million in Indonesia.

However, the Pope’s visit to Singapore is by no means a secondary priority. The Holy See is well aware of the importance of this powerful enclave in Asia. In the 19th century, Singapore emerged as the new strategic stronghold for the Catholic Church in the Strait of Malacca — held throughout the 18th century by Dutch Protestants — between the Catholic strongholds of Goa (India) and Macao (China).

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It was the Paris Foreign Missions, in the person of Father Jean-Marie Beurel (1813-1872), who first understood the importance for the Church of this island between the Straits of Malacca and the East China Sea, purchased by the British in 1819.

Many Chinese, Tamil, and European Catholics settled here, contributing to the growth and prosperity of the city, where they now account for 6.7% of the population.

Sylvia Kooh, baptized at birth by a priest from the Paris Foreign Missions, is now 71. She emphasizes the decisive role played by the missionaries in her city, particularly the Marists, Lasallians, and missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

“They built not only churches, but also schools and hospitals,” explains Kooh. She has been a volunteer guide at Singapore’s Good Shepherd Cathedral for the past seven years.

“Many government officials and authorities come from these missionary schools and are indebted to the education they received,” adds a leader of a religious order in Singapore.

Today, Singaporean Catholics are often involved in missionary services, particularly in the poorer neighboring countries of Southeast Asia, says Sylvia Kooh. These links between Catholics and their neighbors are also experienced within Singapore, where more than a million seconded workers (employees temporarily sent to work in the country for a foreign company) now reside, mainly from India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and to whom Catholic charities provide invaluable assistance.

By visiting Singapore, the Pontiff also chose to visit one of the largest communities in the Chinese diaspora. Nearly 75% of the country’s population is of Chinese origin, the result of a major wave of migration in the first half of the 20th century. Chinese — in its Singaporean variant — is one of the country’s four official languages, and it’s possible to attend Mass in Mandarin and Cantonese in many parishes.

“Our Chinese roots are very distant, and those who live here have no connection with China,” says a leader of one of Singapore’s many religious orders. In particular, he assures us that exchanges between Singaporean Catholics and the Catholic Church in China are “limited,” even though a delegation from Hong Kong is expected in Singapore during Francis’ visit. “I don’t think he’ll mention China in Singapore,” says the religious.

Nevertheless, this greenhouse of Chinese culture can play an important role for the Catholic Church, as illustrated by the case of Fr. Emmanuel Lim, a Jesuit from Singapore. Nicknamed “Panda” by those close to him, he worked for Zhonglian — a Chinese-language Catholic network — for many years before taking over as head of Vatican Radio’s Mandarin section in 2007. And since 2019, this discreet expert on the Church in China has been working in the diplomatic section of the Secretariat of State, an essential cog in the rapprochement with Beijing.

Although Asian, Singapore also has significant Western roots, making it an ideal neutral ground for fostering encounters with the Chinese world. For the Holy See, this is mainly expressed in the interreligious sphere, as was the case during a meeting with representatives of Taoism in 2018.

What makes Singapore so special is its particularly atypical religious landscape: 31% of its citizens are Buddhists, 20% atheists or agnostics, 19% Christians (6.7% Catholics), 16% Muslims, 9% Taoists, and 5% Hindus (2020 census). This great religious diversity is also characterized by a “high level of religious tolerance,” a Singaporean priest tells us.

The reason for this peaceful cohabitation of Eastern and Western beliefs, however, is mainly due to the actions of the Singapore government, which has put in place a very strict policy. It fights all religious extremism, notably by prohibiting “bad-mouthing other religions,” stresses the priest.

For French theologian and anthropologist Michel Chambon, who teaches at the National University of Singapore, the government is taking a defensive stance towards religions, because it considers that they can endanger the equilibrium of Singaporean society.

Singapore’s Catholics, says the theologian, were particularly “traumatized” by Operation “Spectrum,” which took place in 1987, just one year after John Paul II’s visit to the city-state. This involved the arrest by police forces of 16 people, many of them Catholics, who were imprisoned without trial under an internal security law.

The government justified this action by claiming that the accused had used the Catholic Church as a front to foment a communist uprising in Singapore. With the head of the diocesan Justice and Peace Commission and three other lay leaders among those arrested, the then Archbishop Gregory Yong protested.

However, the archbishop, summoned by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, was finally forced to accept the government’s action. Yew presented him with confessions from the accused, most likely obtained under torture. For Michel Cambon, the Singaporean government created this affair to force the Catholic Church to stop getting involved in certain highly sensitive social justice issues, after seeing the key role it had played in Poland, the Philippines ,and South Korea. One key issue was the living conditions of domestic servants, often close to slavery.

Without evoking this painful antecedent, Sylvia Kooh believes that Catholics today are “very active” in the interfaith field by choice. Indeed, she says, they are often the initiators of meetings between leaders. For Michel Chambon, however, this is often a very formal dialogue, the result of state constraints alone: “We have tea together, but sometimes, we have no theological desire to learn from each other.”

A Singaporean priest acknowledges that the government’s “strict control” of the churches is still a reality, particularly when it comes to the arrival of religious representatives from abroad. However, in his opinion, this framework allows for a peaceful coexistence that could be highlighted by Pope Francis, promoter of brotherhood among religions.

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