Yoon Suk-yeol, a conservative former top prosecutor, was declared winner in South Korea’s presidential polls on March 10, defeating a liberal rival in one of the most closely fought polls in the country’s history.
With more than 98 percent of the ballots counted, Yoon managed to secure 48.6% of votes against his rival Lee Jae-myung’s 47.8%. Both candidates spent months mocking and demonizing each other in a bitter political campaign.
Yoon will take office in May as leader of the world’s 10th-largest economy to serve a single five-year term.
In his first public action, after he became the presidential candidate for the People Power Party last October, he visited Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul on a Sunday, sang hymns and prayed with the congregation. Media reports said the move was to attract Christian votes and silence critics who said he followed shamanism.
He was baptized with the name Ambroise in the Catholic Church but he does not practice his faith life in any parish community, according to Church sources.
Christianity has emerged as the largest religion in South Korea and is followed by some 28% of its 51 million people, according to the 2015 national census. A larger group, some 56%, follows no religion at all. Some 15% follow Buddhism, making it the second-largest religion in the country.
In the run-up to the election, Yoon promised to deal sternly with provocations by North Korea and to boost trilateral security ties with Washington and Tokyo.

Some 16 parishes in Loikaw Diocese in Myanmar’s Kayah state have been totally abandoned with the escalation of the conflict between military and rebel forces.
The green and mountainous eastern region bordering Thai-land was relatively peaceful for decades but has seen intense fighting since May 2021.
Parish priests, nuns and parishioners from these parishes have fled to safe areas, according to church officials.
Nearly two-thirds of the 90,000 Catholics in Kayah state have been forced to flee their homes, they added.
The junta has unleashed airstrikes and artillery shelling, forcing thousands of people including women, children, the elderly and the infirm to flee their homes to seek refuge in nearby jungles or churches in neighboring villages and towns.
At least seven Catholic churches have been hit by artillery shelling and airstrikes by Myan-mar’s military in Loikaw Diocese, with 16 out of 38 parishes severely affected by the intensifying fighting.
More than 650 houses and other civilian properties including churches, monasteries and schools have been burned or destroyed in Kayah since May 2021, according to reports cited by the UN.
Meanwhile, some parishes in Pekhon Diocese that covers Shan state and border areas of Kayah state have also been affected by the conflict.

Bishops and priests joined fisher people in Sri Lanka on March 3 to demand protection of their livelihoods from destructive development projects that were harming the coast and the sea. Sebastian Fernando, a leader of local fishers, said: “The sea bed has been eroding for years. The people are constantly complaining but the authorities have not paid attention to their demand for a permanent solution.”
He said the sand being pump-ed to fill the east and west jetties of Colombo port was having a huge impact on fishing in the country. Seaweed and ornamental fish are greatly affected.
“The disaster-struck X-press Pearl ship also caused great damage to our marine environment but fishermen did not receive fair compensation,” said Fernando, referring to the environmental disaster unleashed by a cargo ship carrying chemicals that caught fire off the coast of Sri Lanka in May 2021.
Several containers have washed ashore from the X-press Pearl and nitrogen oxides have been released into the air and sea in large quantities, exposing the island nation to acid rain in the future, say experts.
Environmentalists have warn-ed that the chemicals inside the containers could enter the sea-water and pose a threat to the marine life system in the short and long term. The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka has repeatedly urged the government to compensate fishing families for their loss of livelihood and restore the environment.

School education, the last bastion of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, is falling asunder like the beads of a broken necklace.
The blood-red flag with five yellow stars flutters in the air on campuses in Hong Kong as it did in mainland China following the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989.
Students in Hong Kong are getting familiarized with patriotism with Chinese characteristics because there are still black sheep in universities and schools whose capitalist hearts have to be won over before they initiate the long march to socialism.
University and high school students made up the majority of protesters in 2019 and teenagers represented almost a fifth of the 10,000 arrests made as part of the crackdown, according to data by Bloomberg.

Eddie Lo grew up in a religionless Chinese family and never considered practicing a religion despite his schooling under Catholic priests and brothers. But the Covid-19 pandemic and Hong Kong’s democracy struggle helped him change.
The 55-year-old professional karate trainer says “the seed of faith” he received at Hong Kong’s St Antony’s Primary School, run by the Salesians, has matured after four decades.
He is now a catechumen preparing to be baptized Ignatius Lo on Easter Saturday in St. Patrick’s Parish in Lok Fu under Hong Kong Diocese.
Lo is among some 1,550 adults under-going catechumen classes in 52 parishes and territories of the diocese, readying themselves to be baptized this Easter season.
Each year several thousand adults join Hong Kong Diocese. During Easter 2019, before the pandemic hit, some 2,800 adults were baptized. The number of adult baptisms has dwindled since then.
Lo grew up in a traditional family “with Dad and Mum following Confucius thinking but without any religion,” he recalled. He followed no religion until a year ago.
The isolation of the pandemic restrictions and the chaos of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy campaign guided him to the Catholic Church, he says.
As a martial arts trainer, his focus was on physical energy and techniques to control mind and body. But social disruption since 2019 as well as the pandemic made him “think and feel differently, especially with my students.”
Lo recalls that he was “harsh and tough” with his students to help them win competitions and gain recognition.
“But after what happened in Hong Kong, I began to appreciate young people with independent thinking and changed the way I teach them,” he says.
Young university students have been spearheading the pro-democracy movement with thousands taking to the streets protesting what they called their shrinking freedoms. It continued until the Chinese government suppressed protests with a sweeping new security law in June 2020.
As Covid-19 lockdowns and isolation continued, Lo wanted a change. He began to think about the meaning and purpose of life and even tried new things like making bread and practicing iaido, a Japanese martial art. “At the same time, I wanted someone to guide me for the future. I began to think that I needed more mental support and someone to rely on,” he says.