by Aidyn Austin | @AidynAustin
As God ensures that we are in the place we need to be in at the time we need to be there, so Father Simon Li arrived at St. Jerome’s, Tin Shui Wai, on a cool February day in 2018. His appointment as the priest of a parish named for the Bible’s great translator had a significance that was immediately apparent to him. “When I was sent here, it was good,” is how the genial 53-year-old puts it.
Hong Kong-born, but of Fujianese extraction, Father Li first began to encounter Catholicism at Choi Hung Estate Catholic Secondary School, when Church instruction was made available to him in his native tongue. By Italian priests, no less.
“I was in Form 3,” he says, “and the school had an arrangement—you could go to Bible class or catechism class. Bible class was in English so, of course, I chose catechism because the priest taught us in Cantonese.”
His catechists made a lasting impression. “I thought ‘How come a foreigner travels from Italy to Hong Kong, and gives up his family and friends, and learns a new language?’ Cantonese is not easy to learn. I feel they really sacrificed a lot, and I admired their lives, and [what they went through to] spread the gospel to us.”
Childhood asthma made it hard for Father Li to focus on his studies beyond Form 5 and instead he took a job at an electronics factory in San Po Kong. “Have you seen Charlie Chaplain in Modern Times? That was me,” he laughs.
He attended church at St. Patrick’s Mass Centre in Wang Tau Hom, and became an enthusiastic volunteer. “I spent most of my spare time there,” he says. But he never forgot the bilingual and trilingual priests of his school years and by the age of 25 he discerned a vocation, entering the seminary.
Today, the polyglot tradition continues at St. Jerome’s. The surrounding district, Yuen Long, is home to almost seven per cent of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities. There is a significant population of asylum seekers and the English-language Sunday morning Mass is crowded with Tagalog-speaking Filipino domestic workers. One of the assistant parish priests, Father Joachim Li Yongxin, preaches in Cantonese instead of his native Mandarin and gives regular classes in Spanish, which he picked up when he was sent to Paraguay shortly after his ordination. The condition of attendance is “you have to bring a non-Catholic with you,” Father Li says with a smile.
Stained glass windows depicting the first six days of Creation, as described in the Book of Genesis. Photo: Aidyn Austin | @AidynAustin 
Father Simon Li, parish priest of St. Jerome’s Church. Photo: Aidyn Austin | @AidynAustin
St. Jerome—who spoke Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Syriac and some Arabic—would have approved.
The scholar, born in what is now Croatia, was a young secretary to Pope Damasus when the pontiff asked him, in 382AD, to translate the Bible into Latin. It was a pressing task. Latin was gradually replacing Greek as the language of the Roman Empire, but the existing Latin translations of Holy Scripture were inadequate. Not only were they too colloquial but, being hand-copied, they transmitted and amplified errors from the Greek translations of Hebrew texts.
His knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and his training in Latin grammar and rhetoric, made Jerome supremely qualified for the job. He could directly translate the original Judeo-Greek of the gospels and go straight to the Hebrew sources of the Old Testament, rendering them all in beautiful, scholarly Latin. By 405AD, he had completed the great task.
In honour of St. Jerome—whose feast day is September 30—the 26-year-old Tin Shui Wai church that bears his name takes its inspiration from the scriptures. The interior designer, Sister Yu Wai-ying, called for impressive stained glass windows on the right of the church that tell the story of creation from the Book of Genesis. In the centre, behind the altar, other windows show New Testament scenes, such as the Annunciation, descent of the Holy Spirit, and the Nativity. On the far left, a vivid portrait of Our Lady, as she appears in the Book of Revelation, acts as a coda to this visual journey through the Holy Book.
Fittingly, much of the activity in the parish revolves around the Word of God. In fact, Father Li sees it as his central mission.
“When I first came here, my expectation was how to get the parishioners to know the Word, to push the parishioners to read their Bibles,” he says, before gesturing at the church’s interior. “Here, I have to be close to the Bible, to the Scriptures.”
He doesn’t just get churchgoers to read the Bible. When the community was preparing for the 25th anniversary of St. Jerome’s Church, Father Li asked his congregation to write parts of it out, too. “We asked schools, parishioners, everyone, to copy a passage of the Bible by hand, even we priests had to copy a chapter and then we bound it all together.”
It was an epic act of devotion and one that should inspire all of us to immerse ourselves in the Word of God.
“If you don’t know the Bible, you don’t know Jesus Christ,” Father Li says. “That’s what St. Jerome taught us, and that is my aim in this community.”
