Bishop Ignatius C. Wang was ordained in 2003 as an auxiliary for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, but the Chinese-born prelate said Chinese Catholics across the continent want his ministry to include them.

"They expect a lot of things," he said in an interview in New York Dec. 11.

Bishop Wang, who is archdiocesan Propagation of the Faith director in San Francisco, was brought to New York by the national Society for the Propagation of the Faith office to participate in a Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral Dec. 9 to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

The bishop said that while he was a seminarian in Hong Kong he became inspired by Archbishop Sheen through reading "Life Is Worth Living" and other writings of the archbishop.

Later, when he was a graduate student in Rome, Archbishop Sheen would come and talk to seminarians there, he reported. And during Archbishop Sheen's last years, in the 1970s, Bishop Wang was again impressed by the retreats the archbishop gave in the San Francisco area.

Bishop Wang said he supported the sainthood cause of Archbishop Sheen, not so much for the canonization itself but as a step that would help to ensure preservation of his legacy of thought and devotion to the Eucharist.

He said that when Archbishop Sheen is mentioned to older Catholics their "eyes begin to brighten up," but because younger people need something extra to help them understand "his legacy has to go on."

While in New York, Bishop Wang stayed to celebrate Chinese-language Masses Dec. 12 at two churches in Chinatown --- using Mandarin at one and a combination of Mandarin and Cantonese at the other --- and visit with members of the Chinese community at meals they arranged to follow the Masses.

Bishop Wang said Archbishop William J. Levada of San Francisco encouraged him to respond to calls from Chinese Catholics outside the archdiocese as much as he can without neglecting his work at home.

In the two years Bishop Wang has been a bishop, he has visited Chinese Catholic communities in Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington and Miami, as well as dioceses in California, he reported.

He is hoping to visit Dallas and Houston, where he said Chinese Catholics are building churches. And he is already scheduled to go next year to the Chinese Martyrs Catholic Church in Toronto, which will be his first Canadian visit since becoming a bishop.

Bishop Wang said the Chinese people expect him to play a special role because he is the first Chinese ordained to serve as a bishop in the West --- the Western Hemisphere or Europe.

To counter the widespread view that Catholicism is a Western religion, he said, he only has to "show my face." But he said that he also liked to point out that Buddhism, the religion of many Chinese, came from India and was as foreign to China as Christianity.

Since the late 1950s, when communist authorities outlawed the Catholic Church, China has had an underground church that professes loyalty to the pope. A government-approved church officially spurns ties to the Vatican, but up to two-thirds of its bishops are said to have reconciled secretly with the Vatican.

But Bishop Wang said the term "underground" was misleading because there are congregations in the church that people know about. Some even have a church with a belfry and a cross on top, and a priest ringing the bell for Mass.

"I don't believe anything happens in China secretly," he said.

Bishop Wang said he still has family in Beijing, and visited there in September. In China, he reported, he has relationships with Catholics in the government-approved church and the underground church.

On human rights, Bishop Wang said the Chinese government had "room for improvement," but overall he did not see persecution of Christians as the major problem it is sometimes reported to be.

Although the underground churches refuse on principle to obey the government's requirement to register, Bishop Wang said, he does not necessarily object to the government requiring that religious congregations register.

The more important and encouraging aspect of Chinese life, he said, is the improvement for Christians since the days when all religious expression was forbidden by leaders of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976.

---CNS