Time For Asia's Bishops to Rise to Fresh Challenges

Akkad in Mesopotamia was the center of the world's first empire some 25 centuries before Christ. The Akkadian language outlasted the empire, becoming the language of several later cultures, including Babylonia.

Even 45 centuries later, we possibly still use a couple of words from that language in our day-to-day activities, words that may descend from the Akkadian words asu, "to ascend," and erub, "to descend." They were the roots of the words for "east" and "west," where the sun ascends and descends. In English, we pronounce them "Asia" and "Europe."

Eventually, the word "Asia" came to mean the mass of lands, cultures and peoples east of the Roman Empire's heartland, a usage that survives in the Catholic Church.

That is why the Church's 1998 Extraordinary Synod for Asia included parts of the world such as Lebanon that nobody thinks of when they hear the word Asia. It also accounts for Pope John Paul II's meaningless exclamation in Ecclesia in Asia that Jesus was born in Asia.

In fact, the concept of Asia is a Western one. No culture outside of Europe seems to have tried to develop a single word or concept to encompass and categorize hundreds of cultures, languages, religions and environments either in their own neighborhood or for the whole world.

In Europe itself, its own continental designation came to embody a sort of nostalgia for the unity of the Roman Empire, a nostalgia that finds its latest manifestation in the European Union.

So, what is Asia? The word is used to cover so much that it actually designates nothing. Tour guides in Israel, petroleum engineers in Saudi Arabia, shepherds in Afghanistan, software developers in India, fisherfolk in the Philippines, monks in Thailand, artists in Indonesia, factory workers in China, Orthodox priests in Siberia, "salary men" in Japan - what have they in common? Not much beyond their human genome and an ancient Roman designation of them all as Asian.

There is, however, one area where the word Asia has taken on a useful meaning. Ironically, it has done so within the Catholic Church which is so wedded to the language, culture, mindset and even geography of the Roman Empire.

The Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences began in 1970 when a group of bishops realized that more than any geographic designation, there were challenges and opportunities that linked them: post-colonial Churches that lacked power, the development of local Church leaders, the encounter with great religious and philosophic systems, poverty, political oppression and the beginnings of democracy.