Cardinal Guided Korea Through Yushin Dictatorship

By Brother Anthony of Taize

The first time I met Cardinal Kim, we were in a rickety shack built over the water in a harbor in Hong Kong in 1977. I had come from the Philippines, where I was living, to be with a group of brothers from our main community in France. We had been there for a month, with our prior, the founder of the Community of Taize, Brother Roger. Suddenly we saw a small boat coming across the harbor with a tall man standing in it ― Cardinal Kim. He was visiting Hong Kong and had heard that Brother Roger was there, so he had come to meet him.

Later I several times heard the cardinal talk about his first visit to Taize in France, in 1973, when he had been amazed and touched to hear the brothers in that remote village praying for Korea. That had been the time of the Yushin crisis, when the cardinal was a leading figure in the resistance to the merciless dictatorship that was denying Koreans any kind of democratic freedom. In 1977 many members of the Catholic Church, together with Protestants and Buddhists, were also being arrested, beaten and tortured for demanding basic rights for Korea's workers. We knew that the Cardinal was doing everything that he could to support them, and was suffering from having so little impact on an increasingly inhuman regime.