Diplomatic gobbledygook can’t obscure awkward facts. Four years after the provisional agreement, many Chinese dioceses remain without a bishop. The underground church is still underground. Local Communist officials continue to bulldoze churches at their discretion. Bishops continue to be arrested or simply disappear. Hong Kong’s former bishop, Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun, is currently on trial for “colluding with foreign forces” for his involvement with a fund defending protesters. Beijing continues to make amply clear that the Catholic Church is subservient to the state—with Catholic belief and practice subject to party doctrine.
One might argue that the church is skilled at thinking in the very long term, knowing that times, conditions and regimes change. A neutral observer might easily see the current moment as an inflection point in global affairs. Chinese power and influence are on the rise. Western hegemony seems to be in decline. The papacy has rarely been averse to shrewd realpolitik, so a Vatican strategy that bets on China and an eventual softening of Beijing’s approach to religion could make sense. It also fits comfortably with chronic European resentments of the U.S., shared at times within the Holy See, and the Latin American animus against the giant to the North in Francis’s pontificate.
But as former Czech dissident Václav Havel warned decades ago, ideological states are resilient. They’re not like standard dictatorships. China’s ruling elite and vigorous nationalism may seem familiar, but they’re not. They’re sustained by a left ideology that functions as a gnostic religion, hostile to any competitors. When combined with China’s social-credit and control system—the most invasive and pervasive in history—the church faces an entirely new kind of Caesar.
Go here to read the rest. PopeWatch hopes that someone in the Vatican is being heavily bribed by China, otherwise the Vatican-China deal, one of the most one sided agreements in the history of diplomacy, is a matter either of complete idiocy, or complete allegiance to China.
“The Holy See misunderstands the nature of the Chinese regime and in so doing, abandons the Catholic faithful.“
Sorry but “misunderstand” as in -abortion-rights advocates don’t belong on the Pontifical Academy for Life?
Poland had heroic saintly men of the cloth LEADING the way to religious freedom.
Cowardice be damned.
With inflation, what’s 30 pieces of silver worth 2000 years later? I’m guessing Francis did the math.
The bottom line is that the giggling mitred servile wolves in Rome are culpable for what they are doing to actual Catholics. The realities on the ground leave no excuse.
You don’t need the burden of a Bishop. All you need for the Church to be alive is the Faithful and a few priests to cele trays mass and minister the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Faithful.
*celebrate
For a while, yes. Far from a burden, the bishop is the leader of the local church. He cannot be dispensed with long term.
While I admire the Japanese Catholics who survived with marriage and baptism until the 1860s, that’s not how Scripture and Tradition would have it be.
The problem is that we should not be at the mercy of Rome in who our shepherds (or, in the case of Cupich, et al, anti-shepherds) are. If the Chinese Communist Party can select candidates, we can, too.
Rome’s crippling problem right now is the post-Vatican I papal office. The pontiff seems bent on confirming all of the Orthodox and Protestant arguments against the papacy.
Back in 2020, the fearless Cardinal Zen visited Rome in the hope of getting an audience with Francis and discussing the situation in his former diocese of Hong Kong. He was never given an audience, but before he returned to China (and his inevitable imprisonment) he handed a letter to one of Francis’ secretaries, who promised to pass it on to the Pope. If Francis ever saw that letter, he doesn’t seem to have responded to it. Neither has he responded to other letters Cardinal Zen since wrote to him, as the Cardinal himself stated in a interview with Religion Unplugged two years ago.
In that same interview, His Eminence also pointed out that the terms of the compact between Rome and China have been kept secret even from himself, a Chinese Cardinal. In other words, the Chinese government could claim the agreement gave them the authority to do anything it wants to the Church in China, and no bishop in China has the means to contradict such an assertion.
What letter?
What dubia?
Pacamama?
Priorities
Since China is in the driver’s seat, wouldn’t it be more accurate to call the secret agreement the China-Vatican agreement?
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