Magdalene Lee reflects on racial justice and her hopeful journey navigating different cultures and traditions.
Originally from Hong Kong, Magdalene Lee works as the Director of Mission for St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Soho, central London. Magda has spent time living and working around the world, from Hong Kong and Shanghai to Cambridge and New York.
Hello, my name is Magda Lee, and I currently work as the Mission Director for St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Soho, central London. My understanding of racial justice has developed and deepened through a range of experiences living and working across the world, from Hong Kong and Shanghai to the Middle East and London. Seeing the fruits of providence in the enduring value of cultural traditions and customs across different times and places has given me great hope in the possibility of fruitful integration that both honours one’s cultural inheritance and creates space for new connections.
I was born and raised in Hong Kong before moving to Shanghai at the age of 10. At 17, I migrated to London to embark on university studies in art history and curating. Arriving in London, I found a warm welcome at St Patrick’s church in Soho, which was home to both a Chinese ethnic chaplaincy and a school of evangelisation. The chaplaincy provided a sense of home and cultural familiarity in a new place, while the school of evangelisation helped me to grow my faith and explore the desire to spread my faith in a new environment. From my time living in quite an international community in Shanghai, I had been influenced by strong examples of Catholic women leading full lives of faith, family and work, and I was grateful to the communities at St Patrick’s for facilitating these aspects of my new life in London.
The complexity of identity, and the possibility of having multiple different identities, was really revealed to me through my work after university for a small Cambridge-based charity supporting Christian minorities in the Middle East during the rise of ISIS terrorism. I worked as a project manager to support local Christian communities (Coptic, Kurdish, Maronite, etc.) to preserve and protect their cultural heritage at a time of conflict and destruction. In working with these communities, I experienced for the first time the diversity and true catholicity of Christianity. Also, I learned more about the possibility of holding multiple identities at once; being both Christian and belonging to a particular cultural tradition with its own unique history and heritage. Identity should be a both/and embrace of our unique backgrounds, rather than an either/or division.
Central to my experience of racial justice and integration has been a great love of the English Catholic church and history, particularly a devotion to the English martyrs. When spending some time working in Hong Kong a few years ago, I came to know a charity connected to the Catholic secondary school Ampleforth College, which supports Hong Kongese families with children studying at Ampleforth. Through my engagement with the charity, I learned more about Benedictine spirituality, English Catholic history and, especially, the witness of the English martyrs.
This sense of a suffering Church and the sacrifices of a Christian community facing persecution really spoke to me, particularly given my experiences supporting threatened Christian minorities in the Middle East and the history of Christian persecution in China. In this case, my own racial and cultural background helped to create space for new and fruitful connections with English Catholic culture, seeing both the similarities and the differences in the historical experiences of both communities.
Lastly, I would like to highlight the important role that chaplaincies and evangelisation missions can play in fostering racial justice. On the one hand, chaplaincies can be effective landing zones for those arriving in England and Wales, providing a familiar space to support the introduction and integration to a new place. On the other hand, evangelisation missions offer an opportunity for those from different places to share in the life of the local Church and make new connections between their past and the present.
At times, chaplaincies can run the risk of becoming too insular and isolated from the surrounding community and I would strongly encourage, in the Jubilee Year theme of ‘Pilgrims of Hope’, that all members of the Catholic community in England and Wales, whether newly arrived or long settled, keep and foster that sense of mission and evangelisation, looking outwards to the world.
An advocate for racial justice and a Permanent Deacon for the Archdiocese of Southwark.
Cornelius Ndubuisi a reflection of past experiences and what racial justice means to me today
