A Fatal Compromise in China
The decisions of the late Pope Francis are still taking their toll on Catholics, especially in China, where a Human Rights Watch report has warned that a Vatican-Beijing accord approved by Francis in 2018 still “facilitates” a “crackdown” against Chinese Catholics.
The Vatican established an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2018, allowing the Pope to approve or veto Catholic bishops who were chosen by the CCP. Then-Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said at the time that the agreement was “not political but pastoral, allowing the faithful to have bishops who are in communion with Rome but at the same time recognized by Chinese authorities,” but figures like Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, warned that the deal would result in the further persecution of “underground” Catholics: those who refuse to adhere to the CCP’s ideological agenda. Zen was right.
Human Rights Watch reported that the CCP is “increasing pressure on underground Catholic communities to join the state-controlled official church,” increasing ideological control, surveillance, and travel restrictions on approximately 12 million Chinese Catholics and arresting, torturing, and “disappearing” priests and bishops. “A decade into Xi Jinping’s Sinicization campaign and nearly eight years since the 2018 Holy See-China agreement, Catholics in China face escalating repression that violates their religious freedoms,” said Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Pope Leo XIV should urgently review the agreement and press Beijing to end the persecution and intimidation of underground churches, clergy, and worshipers.”
Of course, the Church ought not abandon Catholics to be murdered and executed and Church leaders should work to halt or alleviate persecutions where possible.
The CCP has long practiced religious persecution against its own people, but the persecution worsened when incumbent President Xi Jinping took power in 2012. The Vatican-Beijing agreement has allowed that persecution to further escalate, granting CCP authorities a claim to legitimacy and the appearance of Church approval. One individual cited by Human Rights Watch said that the Vatican-Beijing agreement left “underground” Chinese Catholics “no other choice but to join the official church,” while another called the deal an “intelligent weapon to legally destroy underground churches.” Another said that “members of those communities are used to persecution from the [Chinese] government,” but since the Vatican-Beijing agreement was first brokered in 2018 “they feel like the Vatican is also coming after them.” A priest who was interviewed warned that “many underground bishops are old, and they [Vatican and Beijing] are not appointing new underground bishops. Those communities may survive with their priests for a while but in the long run, underground Catholics [in China] will be gone.”
CCP officials forcibly subject Catholic priests and bishops to regular political and ideological training sessions, sometimes as often as twice a week, and require priests and bishops to have their teaching, homilies, and catechesis approved by the state. Children are often barred from entering churches and credible reports suggest that the CCP has banned at-home religious education and religiously-run charitable activities.
While the 2018 revision of China’s Regulations on Religious Affairs does not explicitly prohibit children from attending church services or receiving religious education, CCP officials have shut down churches for allowing children to attend, and some priests and bishops have asked parents not to bring their children for fear of being shut down by the CCP themselves. One Catholic interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that the exclusion of children is “aimed at cutting generational ties within the Catholic community.” CCP authorities have installed cameras in Catholic churches, rescheduled Masses and other events for inconvenient hours to reduce attendance, and even required Catholics to register and apply for state permission to attend Mass. In some cases, parishioners have had to host prayer groups under the guise of permissible events such as weddings.
Priests affiliated with underground parishes that have been forced to join the state-sanctioned “church” have, in many instances, been forced to flee the country or face brutal persecutions. Underground bishops Augustine Cui Tai and Thaddeus Ma Daqin have been detained and held under house arrest, bishops Vincent Guo Xijin and Peter Shao Zhumin are also under arrest, while bishops James Su Zhimin and Xin Wenzhi have been forcibly disappeared. The government has also imposed strict and arbitrary travel restrictions on Catholic priests and religious people, requiring travel plans to be approved by the state beforehand.
The Vatican-Beijing accord is a significant error for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it purports to share power with the CCP. The Catholic Church has, since the beginning, claimed absolute supremacy and infallibility. In the 1302 papal bull Unam Sanctam, Pope Urban VIII clarified that the Catholic Church is led by the Roman Pontiff and is supreme over all other temporal powers. “[O]f the one and only Church there is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster,” Urban VIII wrote. “We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal,” he continued, referring to the two swords carried by the Apostles in the Gospels (see Luke 22:38 and Matthew 26:52), which theologians have long held to represent spiritual authority and temporal authority. Temporal authority, the medieval pontiff argued, must be subject to the spiritual authority of the Church, led by the Pope. “For with truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgment if it has not been good.”
Whether in the name of “pastoral” care or not, the Vatican-Beijing accord would seemingly place the authority of the Roman Pontiff, an office established by Christ Jesus himself as the sole and supreme head of the Church, on a par with the authority of the CCP, a political group expressly opposed to the principles and moral law of the Catholic Church and responsible for a lengthy litany of horrific abuses of power and violations of human dignity, including mass murder. This is unacceptable.
Second of all, as Human Rights Watch noted in its report, the Vatican-Beijing agreement illegitimately lends the CCP legitimacy and authority, blurring the line (for Chinese Catholics, whose news and media intake is strictly controlled and censored) between the Catholic Church and the brutally repressive communist regime. Abuses enacted by the CCP against Catholics can be defended by CCP officials as the orders or wises of the Vatican, not only allowing for the continued persecution of Chinese Catholics but leaving many to believe themselves abandoned and betrayed by the Holy Father. If the Vatican-Beijing accord is permitted to remain in effect, then there may in fact be some basis for that sense of betrayal.
The fact is that the Catholic Church was founded in the midst of persecution — Christ Himself, who established the Church, was executed by the state, as was the first Pope, St. Peter — and has not only survived every persecution wielded against it, but has even flourished. The persecutions of Nero and Diocletian did nothing to halt the spread of Christianity, but instead gave the Church some of her earliest and most admirable martyrs and inspired thousands upon thousands to become baptized.
The persecutions of Elizabethan England did not succeed in stamping out the Catholic Faith, but instead produced bold martyrs and witnesses to the Faith: Edmund Campion, Cuthbert Mayne, Ralph Sherwin, Alexander Briant, Robert Southwell, John Payne, Luke Kirby, Thomas Ford, Margaret Clitherow, Margaret Ward, Anne Line, and many others. Korea’s Joseon Dynasty also failed to destroy Catholicism, despite stringent bans and thousands of mass executions in the early 19th century. Instead, the number of Catholics in the country more than tripled.
Of course, the Church ought not abandon Catholics to be murdered and executed and Church leaders should work to halt or alleviate persecutions where possible. But the Vatican-Beijing accord does no such thing: it simply legitimizes ongoing persecutions while diluting the Church’s teachings and authority. There are many wounds left over by the Francis pontificate that are in need of healing; some of those wounds will take decades to heal. Pope Leo XIV could start by reversing the disastrous Vatican-Beijing deal.
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