Recently I was talking with a priest in the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J., about the deep piety and firm faith among Filipino Catholics that I have met. I take a Sunday Mass once a month at St. Agnes Church in New York City. The church is located very close to Grand Central Station. I have been told that the church is about 40% Filipino.

My friend remarked that, when he was stationed in Newark, he did some work with the Korean Catholics in that city. He was high in his praise of the Koreans. In Korea itself the Church has grown rapidly during the past twenty years or so. It so happens that I know many Chinese Catholics.

As the conversation progressed, the other priest remarked that there are several African-American bishops in the USA, even though the number of black Catholics is relatively low. In fact, one of them may be the next president of the USCCB, namely, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Ill.

Then my interlocutor said that, to his knowledge, there is not one Asian bishop in the United States. He asked me if I knew of any and I had to reply that I had not heard of one.

In the past fifty years, at least since World War II, we have become very sensitive to respecting the rights of minorities. We do have quite a few Hispanic bishops, but that should not surprise us since most of the Hispanic people are Catholic. They are represented in the hierarchy of the United States, but Catholics from the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, China and Japan are not.

The point I want to make in this editorial is that it is time to correct this oversight and to name a few holy Asian priests as auxiliary bishops. Eventually some of them should become bishops of dioceses. We have African-American and Hispanic bishops, so why not some Asian bishops? Asians by the hundreds of millions have still not been evangelized by Catholic missionaries. The presence of some Asian bishops in our midst would bring home to all of us that they are Catholics too and their mother countries need to hear the Good News of Salvation through Jesus Christ. And they need to hear it from Catholic missionaries who have the zeal of a St. Francis Xavier to bring them into the Catholic Church.

If you are concerned about this matter and would like to do something about it, I suggest you write a letter to the president of the USCCB and/or to the Vatican Pro-Nuntio in Washington, D.C. The letter should be respectful and at the same time it should express a certain dismay that, with so many devout Asian Catholics in our midst, especially in our large cities, so far no Asian priests have been selected to become auxiliary bishops.

I suspect that one reason why we do not have an Asian bishop is that almost all of the priests are immigrants from Asian countries and so were educated there. At least that is the case with all of the Asian priests of my acquaintance. I do not know how many Asian seminarians there are here at home, but there are some, especially among the Vietnamese. That is a good sign and perhaps some of them will be named bishops in the future after they have had experience in the priestly ministry. There may be a certain reluctance on the part of our hierarchy to accept immigrant Asian priests as bishops. But that does not seem to be the case with Hispanic bishops, some of whom, I believe, were not born in this country.

There is much concern today about being inclusive, that is, about not leaving minority groups out of the picture. Let’s face it. We have hundreds of thousands of Asian Catholics attending our parish churches and contributing to their support, and there are no Asian bishops to represent them. The time has come for the bishops’ committees that suggest names to the Holy See for new bishops to include the names of competent and dedicated Asian priests. That is the right thing to do and it is long overdue. Kenneth Baker, S.J., Editor

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