The Confession: If you can betray God, who would you not betray?

By Aurelio Porfiri

Hong Kong: a girl, a priest, an inviolable secret. Against the backdrop of the former British colony, a
breathtaking thriller where nobody, or almost, is what it seems. Is a priest always before God, even
when God disappears? But if you betray God, who will you not be able to betray?
The first thriller by Aurelio Porfiri of a series of detective stories that will revolve around the sacraments.
This deals with the sacrament of penance, but the story will also extend to other very important and
current issues, such as China, the post‐conciliar crisis, the situation of restlessness that is experienced in
Hong Kong, divided between its Chinese identity and his aspiration to freedom. A story with
metaphysical traits but well anchored to historical and ecclesial relevance, a story to understand reality
from other points of view.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chorabooks
• Release date: May 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9789887961772

Book preview

XX.

I.

The traffic flowed through the wide streets of Hong Kong with a certain orderliness, without any of the hysterics that are not uncommon to see on the chaotic streets of Italy, particularly towards the southern end of the peninsula. People crowded the pavements and hurried from one place to another, seemingly following a blindly deterministic impulse that, for an outsider, was difficult to understand. Everything seemed to have been neatly organised, with that completely British sense of order that had found its almost perfect incarnation in the city. Everything worked as though the rhythm of the pedestrians’ steps, the sudden accelerations, the pauses in the most unexpected places, were all kept in time by the ticking of a clock.

Father Antonio was thinking upon this while he watched the endless scramble from a table at a Starbucks along the King’s Road, one of the major arteries on the island of Hong Kong, a wide road that sliced through some of the most populated areas of the former British colony, starting at Tin Hau and extending to Fortress Hill and North Point, where the priest currently found himself. He served at the Catholic church of St. Jude, or St. Judas Thaddeus, a few hundred metres away from where he was sitting. The church served the local Catholic community, including numerous Filipina domestic workers and, occasionally, workers of other nationalities who wanted to attend Mass in English. In fact, the Masses in English were very crowded – often there wasn’t enough space in the liturgical hall, so those who couldn’t get in gathered outside instead. Even the Masses in Cantonese, the local language, were far from deserted. True, the area of North Point was a populated area, but what area of Hong Kong wasn’t? In fact, this was one of the characteristics of the former British colony, the river of people that thronged the streets also flowed vertically upwards, into the small apartments in the skyscrapers that towered everywhere.

Father Antonio, who had been a missionary in Hong Kong for around five years, having been in India for the five years before that, admired the place in its own way – the city was certainly different to his native Trento. He admired it but it also concerned him, in a way. The order and cleanliness was something to be enjoyed, but what was there behind it all? What were the millions of Chinese who he passed on the street every second thinking about? What did they want, where did they turn their gaze to if they wanted a deeper and stronger sense of their existence?

Antonio was a man who was approaching middle age and had the typical characteristics of a northern Italian priest, if a man of this type could ever be characterised by some brand of anthropology. A scholar of moral theology, he tried to reconcile the norms of doctrine with the well-known needs of modern man. This mantra of the ‘modern man’ had been repeated to him throughout his years at the seminary, this totem of a man who would not think as a man, but rather as a modern man, entailing a different paradigm of comprehension to that of the traditional man, resulting in modern man having been granted everything, much more than tradition had considered it right to grant. Modernity had become the new key to understanding man in the sense of his place in the world, his direction and his aspirations. As if existence in itself did not have its own original value – being, a value that preceded historical epochs and which, certainly, was still incarnate in them without having lost its original essence. But Father Antonio was imbued with the post-conciliar, with this totem that acted on the consciences of many Catholics and which steered their choices, much more than the true sense of the Council and faith itself. The priest often thought of that passage from the encyclical Populorum progressio of Paul VI: Development cannot be restricted to economic growth alone. To be authentic, it must be well rounded, it must foster the development of each man and of the whole man. As an eminent specialist on this question has rightly said: ‘We cannot allow economics to be separated from human realities, nor development from the civilization in which it takes place. What counts for us is man – each individual man, each human group, and humanity as a whole.’ Paul VI … another idol of the post-conciliars, but the Paul VI who they were comfortable with, not the one of the Humanae vitae, the encyclical which he, as a moral theologian, should have known well but for his professors, who had taught him to scorn and to be suspicious of it, because it was not ‘open to the needs of man’, needs that they certainly thought they knew much better than the traditional teachings of the Church itself.

He was seated with Father Sergio, the head of the religious missionary community that Antonio belonged to. It was not by chance that he found himself with Sergio, a corpulent Neapolitan of 60 years and with long experience as a missionary on the island. Together they had to face a crisis that affected Antonio that now seemed to have risen to such a great level that it was difficult to ignore any longer. There was a certain tension between them, but not because they did not get on – in fact they got on very well with each other. But there are occasions in which what is left unsaid weighs more heavily than what has been said, and this was one of those occasions.

The music was far too loud and made conversation difficult, which ultimately served the purpose, at least apparently, for what happened in that place, or at least was a necessary precursor to ‘something else’. Wanchai, not far away from North Point on the island of Hong Kong, was an area that for many out-of-towners had a very specific attraction: the bars of Lockhart Road. These places were not just simple meeting places for expats, foreigners living in Hong Kong, but were also places where people drank and looked for ‘company’. Now, this company could come from any of the three main types of girls: real prostitutes, who there was certainly no lack of and who were none too discreet in making their presence heard; the domestic workers who, in reality, prostituted themselves with a certain regularity; and the domestic workers in the grey area, who perhaps only went to bars with their friends to have a drink and, in some cases, with the not so secret hope of finding a husband or to try the forbidden thrill of those who find themselves in the second category, not turning their noses up at accompanying men, often Western men, in exchange for something, whether it was money, gifts or, in some cases, even affection. The girls who belong to the category of domestic workers are mostly either Filipina or Indonesian. Indeed, these two countries practically have a monopoly on housemaids in Hong Kong. And many of them are part of this underworld, located on the borders of legality.