Parish Introduction

Traffic:【MRT 4-HUILONG】

Fr. Aloisius Gutheinz, S.J.   gu han song shenfu

Huilong St. William Catholic Church urgently looking for an officially appointed full time Pastor (April 2014)
Huilong is the name of a very populated area in the recently established New Taipei City, formerly called Taipei District, in the West of Taipei City, including the Provincial Lo-sheng Leprosarium (Sanatorium).
After the Chinese-Japanese War, Taiwan was handed over to Japan in 1895. In
1930 the Lo-sheng Leprosarium began its operation on December 12, located on
a large hillside, close to the main road leading from the North to the South
of Taiwan. Protestant Missionaries and Medical Doctors with Nurses moved to
this very poor area rather early, especially members of the Presbyterian
Church, gradually assembling a community of believers over hundred, amidst
the main population of leprosy patients following the popular Buddhist
folk-religion.
Catholic Missionaries came to the Lo-sheng Leprosarium in the late Fifties,
working among the more than 900 leprosy patients, concentrating mainly on
the immigrants from China after 1949, affected by leprosy. In 1963 Sr.
Angeles de Dios, F.I., Sr. Elvira Valentin, F.I., Msgr. Eugene Fahy, S.J.,
and Fr. Frank O'Neill, M.M. decided to build a Church, which was consecrated
on Easter 1965.
A Catholic community of leprosy patients has been born in the following
decades. When I entered the Lo-sheng Leprosarium for the first time in
September 1975, I found 45 Catholics among ca. 800 patients, all of them in
quite miserable conditions. 43 Catholics have gone to the Risen Lord during
the last decades, with 2 leprosy Catholic patients left among ca. 175 patients.

But during the last few years more and more healthy persons from the
populated surrounding HUILONG DISTRICT are coming to the Sunday Eucharist in
the Lo-sheng leprosarium. Due to the Metro-Terminal Construction, the
Catholic community had to move on October 16, 2005 to the new Chapel on the
9th floor of the Huilong Hospital, on the side of the newly constructed
Leprosarium.
A basic transformation is taking place, i.e. from a leprosy-patients
centered Catholic community to a new open community of believers.