Sustainable Living Hong Kong

Once upon a time Christian missionaries descended on Asia to convert the “natives”.

One may take issue with these attempts to convert others to Christianity but there’s no denying their contribution to education and health care for the masses wherever they went. More than a century on, their contribution still proudly stands all over the region, with hospitals and schools named after various patron saints prominent among them.

But the masses be damned today. The mission now, it seems, is to cater strictly to the needs of the moneyed class. St Paul’s Co-educational College has so much donation from well-off alumna and parents that it can fully ignore a simple Christian value of consideration for one’s neighbours and pound through the foundation of a brand new block day after day after day. Noise mitigation? The contractor’s problem, not theirs, apparently.

Canossa Hospital, in its bid to make more money, has embarked on an expansion programme that will add 7,000-square-metre of extra space for new facilities – but apparently has no money to maintain the surrounding greenery and has therefore taken the decision to chop all the trees on the abutting slopes and replace them with – no price for guessing: concrete.

St Teresa Hospital, for its part, has taken to promoting superficial – rather than inner – beauty with active marketing of its plastic surgery services. No, we’re not talking about reconstructive surgery for victims of disfiguring accidents, but the kind designed to make insecure men and women feel – falsely – better about themselves.

Secular humanists have long argued against the failings of religious beliefs – “Let’s be good for goodness’ sake, rather than for fear of some god,” they say – but believers other than those who have been misguided into literal interpretations of their books would argue that at least their religions provide people with a moral compass. Alas, some fine examples the clergy’s setting in Hong Kong.