Priest In Geylang: The Untold Story of the Geylang Catholic Centre

By Fr. Guillaume Arotçarena

Cosmopolitan Singapore—emblematic of globalised capitalism—usually calls to mind a number of clichés: orderly, clean and green, a shopping and business paradise, and a model of sound economic management. Tourists, journalists and passing businessmen cast an absent-minded glance at the local society, noting that the food is excellent, e-communication works well and armoured tanks are absent on street corners.
But after 17 years living here, the author shows a different side of Singapore: looking at her from the grassroots. Beyond his personal atypical story, he draws with light strokes of the brush, a picture of a warm and generous people, much less passive than one is often given to think. He also describes the difficulties faced by civil society, and tracks the rapid social evolution in the city-state as it is confronted with major challenges: a nose-diving demography, cramped territory with an infrastructure which cannot be extended indefinitely, and massive immigration which is increasingly resented by the local population.
Most of all, Fr. Arotcarena places on record the work and significance of the Geylang Catholic Centre, which makes this priest in Geylang himself a legend.

"In essence, Priest in Geylang is more than a much needed missing piece in the history of Singapore. It is a reflection of how political hypersensitivity and unchecked power can lead to the destruction of something good in civil society. This is a part of history that we might never regain, unless we are able to re-embrace the spirit and dedication of Fr Guillaume Arotçarena and his Geylang Catholic Centre volunteers. This insight is something we might have heard murmured in rumour corridors, but never given the clarity of print from the perspective of an insider... you will find no lack of humour, spirit, and a certain contemplative fortitude."
-The Online Citizen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethos Books
• Release date: Aug 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9789811407123

Book preview

What’s the Use? Why Not?

These were the two questions I kept going back to, as I hesitated for a long time before I started writing these lines. Indeed, what was the use? That which I thought I should recount: was it really worth the effort? I have known many colleagues who have had considerably more agitated and even distraught lives, who often have been hurt physically, and who have refused yet to expose their experiences publicly. That probably was due to a sense of propriety and the vivid awareness that the essential does not lie in the telling of injuries, big or small, and of half digested experiences, but rather is to be found in a more intimate and more vertical dimension, transcendental in a sense. I live with that same, strongly held belief.

The comment of an old colleague, now deceased, comes to my mind. He was participating in a diocesan retreat for Singapore priests in the early 1980s which I also attended. It so happened that he was seated next to me. The speaker was an American priest specialising in transactional psychology or something like that. It was a very popular subject at that time. He was telling us how he had been traumatised as a child when his father punished him with one lash of his belt. From that he drew definitive theories which he presented as profound with an air of exaltation fitting for a man ready to step on uncharted territory. He still had not realised that delving deep into the self, one will only find more of one’s own self.

We can break away from this impasse only after we have encountered the other. That man’s approaches were to real spirituality more or less the equivalent of what the units of psychological support, mobilised on every occasion nowadays, are to a genuine sense of brotherhood and human solidarity practised every day and tested over time; they are but an ersatz which merely points to the current trend to medicalise everything. We could say the same thing of the pathetic white walks held after some dramatic deaths have occurred, as if these needed to go on TV to become real. These rallies, unknown to their participants, serve to hide the exacerbated individualism and narcissism prevalent in modern society, the loss of shared values and structures in our communities and the false pretences we entertain in our relations with the tragic realities of life and death. This undoubtedly should be related to the fact that the symbolic spaces of the sacred—those of the churches or the temples—have been forsaken while new community sacred spaces are yet to appear. Perhaps we should reinvent the symbolic circle of the cromlech so as to rediscover the circle! Which brings us back to the disarming naivety of a cleric who had probably lived a rather protected life, from his native farm in the Mid-West to his convent after some years in the seminary, and who was buying himself some existential shivers at no cost at all.

He was the perfect illustration of the old Chinese saying: shao jian duo guai, which means, He who has not seen much is surprised by everything. My old colleague and neighbour at the retreat leaned sideways, quelling with much difficulty a sarcastic smile, and whispered in my ear: Can you believe that? We are fortunate that he was never imprisoned, or subjected to popular judgement in China, as I have been! He would lead us into real spiritual agony! He was being cynical, and with reason. It is imperative that things be put in their proper perspective, whether it be experiences or personal wounds. There are much more important things than the little stories which punctuated my daily life in Singapore between 1980 and 1988.

So, what’s the use? Who will be interested? What can this mini outpouring serve? Reminiscing about your past also makes you vulnerable. Do I really want this? It is quite possible that I am too proud to take that risk. The question has never left me. And yet, I told myself: Why not? Why not pay tribute, in a modest way, to the little ones according to the Gospel, whom I have rubbed shoulders with, and who have taught me so many things? Why not talk about all those people who have worked with me because they dreamt of a better society: more just, more fraternal, nearer to the evangelical ideal, who in some cases have been punished for their generosity by being imprisoned, ill-treated, and at the same time reproached by the self righteous, in the Church and elsewhere?

I dedicate this modest piece of work to Sok Choo (deceased), Aileen (deceased), Bee Leng, Lawrence, Patrick, Jocelyn, Soh Lung, Marilyn, Larry (deceased), Anthony, Suresh, Francis, Guat Hua, Hoe Fang, Wai Han, Roselyn, Vincent, Robert, Thomas (deceased), John, Martin, Richard (deceased), Joseph, Tee Seng, Ah Meng, Ronald, Jude, Lawson, Gary, Helen, Ben, Maria, Grace, Khoon Liang, Josephine, and all the others who have worked at the Geylang Catholic Centre (1980-1987), which later became the Catholic Centre for Foreign Workers, putting all their heart in this venture during all those years, and who have shared my life, my joys and my pains.

Along the way, why not try to paint with light strokes of the brush what Singapore was like in those years, Singapore seen at the grassroots so to say, what the Catholic Church was like, and how among ordinary people and Christians alike, unbounded generosity mingled with a certain kind of fearful fatalism, the same I had experienced, encountering situations over which we finally had little control? In the Singapore lingo, this attitude is defined as kiasu, in the Hokkien dialect. It is so widespread and well-recognised that it has given rise to a fairly substantial body of local literature of self-mockery. Because, contrary to what is often thought, Singaporeans are not averse to making fun of themselves.

Last but not least, I felt the obligation to pass on some of my very modest experience, in the absence of any material goods, together with all my affection, to my grand-nephews and nieces who have only known me as the grumpy old man sitting at the end of the table, where the older generation belongs during family gatherings. I have never forgotten where I came from. This small book thus is for Joana, Idoïa, Andoni, Xan, Imanol, Eñaut, Joan, Oïhana, Elea, Bastien, Eneko, Aïze, Alaïs, Amaury, and Xabi. May they live full and humane lives; may they be touched by the Gospel and be filled by it. I cannot forget their parents, my nieces and nephews, who have known me as a sporadic member of the family, whom they would see only from time to time. My thoughts are with Patxi who left us so suddenly in 2011, Ramuntxo, Pantxika, Miren, Donoxti, Beñat, Maïder, Naïa, Odon, Ibaï, and their spouses. Similarly, I do not forget my brothers and sister, my sisters-in-law, my brother-in-law, and especially my brother Ttomi who has left us and whom we miss. I am grateful to them for having always given me their support.

From what I know, things have not changed much in Singapore in the last 20 years. Material prosperity has increased further, but so have social inequalities while the problems relating to national identity have not been resolved. The gap becomes more and more glaring between a carefully depoliticised population who, however, is now demanding more liberty in all fields, and the political elite who are increasingly obsessed with national and regional security issues and with preserving their hold on power, attached unconditionally as they are to an economic model of ultra liberal growth which is reaching its limits on a narrow tract of land with a disastrous demography, an infrastructure which cannot be extended indefinitely, and an immigration which, for some time already, has exceeded the level of tolerance of the local population. Immigration in fact has changed over the last 20 years. It is no longer an immigration of working classes like domestic workers or construction workers. It now includes middle or upper class executives who are being recruited in numbers from outside the country, often to the detriment of local citizens. Will the global city be less and less the city of Singaporeans?

The voting in of several opposition members during the recent 2011 elections indicates that the political and social debate gradually becomes a feature of everyday life in Singapore. Internet is no stranger to this and some independent bloggers have drawn a big following from the population at large. This in turn forces the traditional media—usually more submissive—to tackle subjects which until now had been largely ignored. In 2013, a publication by the government of a White Paper foreseeing a massive increase in the population by the year 2030 through planned immigration gave rise to a huge protest by thousands of people, something which had never been seen in Singapore in the last 40 years. A few months later, in June, 20,000 people got together to demand rights for homosexuals, largely overflowing the perimeter allotted to the rally by the police. To this day, homosexuality remains an offence under the law in the City-State.

In Singapore, as elsewhere in the world, the old dies and the new is unable to see the day. Let’s hope that contrary to what Gramsci foresaw, the twilight will not engender monsters.

Introduction

Iwas born on a border—the French-Spanish border. It took me some time to understand that this border, although very much real, separated one Basque country from another Basque country. There was another border, more subtle but just as real and perceived as such, with which we were confronted. It was linguistic, with France. Elementary schools, compulsory in the French Republic, would help us build a path to cross it.

Paradoxically, I maintain that borders, like mountains, are not there to separate but to be crossed without forgetting where one comes from. I believe, with hindsight, that growing up at such borders strongly structured my being, my understanding of the Gospel, and the choices I made during my life. Thus it was not surprising in a sense that in my youth, I should come across the Society of Paris Foreign Missions (Missions Etrangères de Paris or MEP as it will be referred to hereafter in this book), which trained missionaries for Asia. Every human life is a mysterious combination of the grace of God and the strength of circumstances. It is up to each one of us to unravel for himself what pertains to one or to the other, or to both at the same time. This crossing of borders towards another shore which the MEP proposed could only appeal to me. The same urge, in Singapore, made me leave the warmth of the Christian community of Katong for the cold periphery of Geylang. The defining feature of missionaries, beyond worn-out clichés, is that they are called to live over borders, on the periphery, and that they need to figure out a way across, to discover fords and pathways, to build roads and bridges. Their horizon can only be what the synoptic gospels call the Kingdom of God and the Book of Apocalypse describes as the gathering of all men and peoples, of all races and languages. This will be called Utopia and self-delusion by disgruntled and cynical spirits whose numbers seem to grow by the day, as they embrace derision and nihilism—the new contemporary dogma—in the name of short-sighted realism. But any act of faith and hope, to a greater or lesser degree, is from a certain point of view part utopia and part illusion, even if it cannot be reduced to that. Besides, as Nietzche used to say: Illusions; what have you got against them? They are what makes life move forward. He should have added that they also cause suffering but, ultimately, it is cynicism, supposedly lucid and realistic, which brings death because it encourages despair.

A world without borders to cross and without boundaries to transgress, a world evened out without any asperities, will be a very sad and desolate place. Yet a robotised, uniformed and non-transparent world of this kind is in the making, a world where suffering of any sort would be medicalised, where uniform thinking would be forced by law. That is the world pressed upon us by those who believe in the so-called circle of reason and who think they invented globalisation which in fact never waited for them to exist and evolve. Free men will resist. George Orwell, come back! They have become mad!

I have felt it necessary to put the small adventure of the Geylang Catholic Centre in its proper context, that of the overall evolution of the MEP, to whom I belong, in the 20th century. This is why I decided to include a text I wrote earlier for a collection of essays dedicated to the MEP and already published by Indes Savantes. (See Annex I)

For those readers who might look for a broader perspective on social and religious changes in Singapore over the last decades, I have included another text also published previously in another collection of essays by Indes Savantes: Christianity, democracy and modernity in Asia. I hope it will bring some useful insights and additional information. (See Annex II)

The Beginnings

How did it all begin? At the end of the 1970s, I was 35 and had already been stationed in Asia for several years. Coming back from my first leave in France, I was appointed as an assistant to the Holy Family parish, in the Katong area, one of the oldest Christian communities in Singapore. It also had, at that time, one of the biggest number of parishioners. Located on the east coast of the island, it was defined at its beginning as Eurasian. At the time, parishes were still defined according to ethnic and linguistic criteria. Thus one would list Teochew parishes— Teochew being one of the dominant Chinese dialects spoken in Singapore—a Cantonese parish, a Tamil parish, and