Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, doing the work the Vatican refuses to do:
The human rights situation in China has deteriorated severely under the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping, especially for religious believers. Credible reports have exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s program of forced sterilizations and abortions of Muslims in Xinjiang, its abuse of Catholic priests and laypeople, and its assault on Protestant house churches—all of which are parts of a “Sinicization” campaign to subordinate God to the Party while promoting Xi himself as an ultramundane deity. Now more than ever, the Chinese people need the Vatican’s moral witness and authority in support of China’s religious believers.
Vatican diplomats are meeting this month with their CCP counterparts to negotiate the renewal of a two-year-old provisional agreement between the Holy See and China. The terms of that pact have never been publicly disclosed; but the Church’s hope was that it would improve the condition of Catholics in China by reaching agreement with the Chinese regime on the appointment of bishops, the traditional stewards of the faith in local communities.
Two years on, it’s clear that the Sino-Vatican agreement has not shielded Catholics from the Party’s depredations, to say nothing of the Party’s horrific treatment of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong devotees, and other religious believers. The State Department’s 2019 annual report on religious freedom provides an illustrative example in the story of Father Paul Zhang Guangjun, who was beaten and “disappeared” for refusing to join the CCP-run Patriotic Catholic Association. Sadly, his experience is not unique. Communist authorities continue to shutter churches, spy on and harass the faithful, and insist that the Party is the ultimate authority in religious affairs.
As part of the 2018 agreement, the Vatican legitimized Chinese priests and bishops whose loyalties remain unclear, confusing Chinese Catholics who had always trusted the Church. Many refuse to worship in state-sanctioned places of worship, for fear that by revealing themselves as faithful Catholics they will suffer the same abuses that they witness other believers suffer at the hands of the Chinese authorities’ increasingly aggressive atheism.
Go here to read the rest. You know you live in strange times when a Presbyterian Secretary of State is far more concerned with the freedom of Catholics than is the Pope.
It is not difficult nowadays to find Protestants who are more Catholic than the Pope. We are happy to have them on our side.
Evil is as evil does. Or as a wise man once said, by his fruit you will know him. Turning closer to home, this immoral man living behind walls had no problem weighing in on an attempt to build a similarly protective wall here in the United States. He said anyone building such a wall is not Christian. Now, there is an opportunity to save the lives of the unborn if this same man would weigh in and say Catholics should demand a pro-life Justice on the Court. Instead, silence. Calling him a whitewashed tomb would be kind.
Secretary of State Pompeo, a Presbyterian, appears to be more Catholic than the Pope.
And I mean that as a compliment. To Pompeo. Not the Pope.