HONG KONG (UCAN): Joseph Cardinal Zen Ze-kiun’s customary Mid-Autumn festival distribution of mooncakes to prisoners in Hong Kong was stopped by the city’s prison officials who claimed the gesture was politically motivated, the cardinal said in his blog on August 31.
The former bishop of Hong Kong has been distributing traditional mooncakes to prisoners since 2010, which falls on October 1 this year.
The cardinal said that he received a letter from the Correctional Services Department asking him to halt the donation campaign because of its political nature, but he emphasised that the mooncake gifts had no political intention but was aimed at reassuring prisoners that people had not forgotten them.
For the past nine years, the cardinal has used social media to solicit donations from the public to distribute mooncakes to all prisoners regardless of faith or politics.
As usual, a month ahead of the festival, he began publicising the campaign by appealing for donations from parishioners and the general public.
Some people who joined the cardinal’s campaign appealed for mooncakes to be given to “the brothers behind bars.” The usage in Chinese could also be construed to mean those arrested and jailed during pro-democracy protests of 2019.
However, Cardinal Zen ruled out any political motivation, pointing out that prison officials always insisted that the mooncakes be uniform and consistent and should be given to all prisoners.
The cardinal said he followed directions by ordering the same kind of cakes from a firm known to him adding that for this reason accepted only money, not cakes, as a donation.
The cardinal said that over the past nine years, inmates looked forward to the mooncakes, Each time he visited them they would enquire if they would get mooncakes during the annual festival.
“It was not because I gave them mooncakes, but the meaning of the mooncakes was that people had not forgotten them,” the cardinal said in his blog.
He said he was “most unhappy to disappoint the inmates this year.” But it may help widen the net “to more helpless and forgotten people such as street sleepers and poor families so that everyone can taste a little sweetness in their bitter life.”
