RELIGION : Priest Brings Hope to Christians in Bangkok’s Slaughterhouse Slum

BANGKOK — An ocean tide had swollen Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River the night before, and the carolers picked their way carefully along the sodden planks.

A gagging stench filled their nostrils, but the voices were clear and rising: “Emmanuel, Emmanuel.”

It is Christmas time in the slaughterhouse slum.

“We are here because they need us,” said Father Joseph Maier, a South Dakota-born Redemptorist. “This is what a priest is supposed to do: work with the poor.”

Few Thais are poorer than this flock in the slaughterhouse, and perhaps no Asian slum is more wretched than Bangkok’s teeming Klong Toey, a sprawl of squatters’ shacks thrown across the marshy shore of the river, hard against the port.

Living in Packing Crates

As Maier’s carolers moved on, passing pens of grunting pigs, slum women peered down from their homes, plywood packing crates suspended in the rafters of the slaughterhouse amid spider webs that hang like Spanish moss. A few picked up the new carol, “Joy to the World.”

A woman led the little band, carrying a ceramic Christ Child in a simple basket, and stopped at the homes of parishioners of Immaculate Conception/Slaughterhouse, the nearby church of the man called “Father Joe.” In each home they sang a few carols, and the priest held out the basket so the family could kiss the feet of Jesus--a rare tableau in this overwhelmingly Buddhist country, where Christians account for less than 1% of the population.

The cross came early to Thailand, brought by the Portuguese in the 1500s when Thai kings ruled in Ayutthaya, up-river from Bangkok. In the old Christian cemetery on Silom Road, a fashionable thoroughfare of this new capital, markers bear the names of the more recent faithful, European and Asian:

Manda Bush, wife of Capt. J. H. M. Bush; Lt. Henry Martin Delatriomphante, Peter Lah Nguyen Van, Paul Boonlert Visevongs, Capt. M. T. Ivancich and Nazzareno Galassi, morto a Bangkok, 15 Gennajo 1917.

Those were simpler times for Christianity in Thailand. This year the Christmas season came to Bangkok in mid-November, when recorded carols were turned on in the big department stores. In the last few weeks the stores have decked their halls with Santas and reindeer, and Buddhist shoppers, mixing Christmas and the coming New Year holiday in their thoughts, are caught up in the spirit of buying.

But for Father Joe, the Christian message has a 365-day season. No evangelist, the outspoken, 49-year-old priest has served in Thailand for more than 20 years, “fighting City Hall and working against what I see as injustice against the poor.”

“These are my people,” he explained as he paced the squalid floor of the slaughterhouse.

During the afternoon, the priest, an expert on slum redevelopment, spoke for a group of squatters faced with eviction from their tumble-down homes. The day before, he paid one of his regular visits to the inmates of Bangkok’s prison, “just to talk with them, to see whether I could do something about their problems.”

“I am the cardinal’s point man for these things,” said Maier, whose brimming ego, tempered with self-effacing humor, befits a man who must wrestle with the mandarins of bureaucracy. “I’m at the cutting edge on social problems, but I will never be a political activist. That’s not my role.”

Protestants Elsewhere

Cardinal Michael Michai Kitbunchu oversees a Roman Catholic community of a few hundred thousand Thais and expatriates, assisted by 300 priests and 2,500 nuns. Among the animist hill tribes of the north, Protestant missionaries are more prevalent. Together, Catholic and Protestant church people work in a sea of Buddhists. The relationship is respectful, but often distant and touched with misunderstanding.

Maier recalled the words of a Thai politician: “Father, you have been here so long and you speak Thai well. It’s time you became a Buddhist monk.” And “he was serious,” the priest noted.

“The monks tend to treat us as lay people,” said Maier, who wears his collar and vestments only in church. “So when you go to the temple, you have to be humble and swallow your pride. But God speaks in many ways and in many voices, and not only to blue-eyed Caucasians.”

And in Bangkok, both priests and monks are often pulled by the same concern for the poor. In some of the 23 slum kindergartens operated here by the Human Development Center, a Christian-funded poverty organization headed by Maier, Buddhist monks volunteer to help teach the children.

The rewards might seem small, but among the 800 families of the slaughterhouse slum, ridden like most poor areas with drugs, gambling and bone-wearying work, any progress is notable. As the carolers followed the Christ Child to another humble home, Father Joe stopped and pointed to a teen-ager in a doorway.

“That girl,” he said, “we straightened her (crossed) eyes. Now she has a high school education. She still lives here and works here, cleaning fish. But her eyes aren’t crossed anymore.”