BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN (UCAN) -- Brunei Catholics marked the second anniversary of the episcopal ordination of their first bishop with a Mass that saw a native seminarian installed as an acolyte.

During the Jan. 22 liturgy at the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in the capital, Bishop Cornelius Sim installed Arin Sugit, 34, as an acolyte.

The prelate presented a chalice to the ethnic Iban seminarian, who will serve at the altar during Mass, distribute Communion and perform other pastoral duties. The Iban are one of several minority indigenous tribes in Brunei.

Bishop Sim was ordained on Jan. 21, 2005 as the apostolic vicar of Brunei, which was elevated from a prefecture in October 2004. An apostolic vicariate is an ecclesiastical jurisdiction in mission regions where the Church hierarchy is not yet fully organized.

In his homily, he told the gathering of more than 800 people that the Brunei Church, even with its 100-year history, now has only four priests. The Church's mission and growth have been set back, the bishop said, because although "the harvest is rich, the laborers are few."

He asked Catholics to pray for priesthood vocations, and especially asked parents for their support.

Fathers Robert Leong and Michael Sia concelebrated the anniversary Mass, with Brother Sugit serving as acolyte.

After the Mass, the Catholics had a dinner in the church compound, where several lay groups performed dances and songs. At the event, the Chinese Coordinating Committee, a lay group, presented the bishop with a photo of himself with Pope Benedict XVI, taken last year.

Bishop Sim was born in Brunei in 1951 and ordained a priest in 1989, shortly after the sultanate achieved full independence from Britain in 1984. He was named first head of Brunei prefecture in 1997, when it was created out of what was then Miri-Brunei diocese. Miri is in the neighboring Malaysian state of Sarawak.

Brunei now has about 5,000 registered Catholics, many of them ethnic Chinese. The rest are mostly ethnic Dusun and Iban. Another 20,000 Filipino migrant workers stay in the country, and most are Catholics. Christians are estimated to account for 10 percent of the 357,800 people of the predominantly Malay-Muslim country.

Committee president Luke Lau Kong-chiong told UCA News on Feb. 7 that he is pleased to see a native seminarian being made an acolyte.

For Lau, this "symbolizes the Church is progressing" in its evangelization work "to the local people, and the inland indigenous (people) are accepting gradually the Good News of Christ."

He observed that since Brunei apostolic vicariate's establishment in 2004, the local Church has become more systematic in its management and administration, as well as younger in its membership.

However, there is still a shortage of priests to serve the vicariate's three parishes and one mission station, he said, adding "the Church often has to invite priests from the Philippines to help while the (ethnic) Chinese Catholics would invite priests from neighboring Malaysia for Chinese Mass."

Brother Sugit, a graduate of local Catholic schools, studied at St. Francis Xavier Major Seminary in Singapore from January 2000 to December 2006.

According to Canon 1035 of the Code of Canon Law: "Before anyone is promoted to the permanent or transitional diaconate, he is required to have received the ministries of lector and acolyte and to have exercised them for a suitable period of time."

The law also states: "There is to be an interval of at least six months between the conferral of the ministry of acolyte and the diaconate." Becoming a deacon is the penultimate formal step toward priesthood.

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