Britain’s Sunday Times questions the Vatican’s subservient attitude toward Xi’s China

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Under the title “The Pope is Beijing’s unlikely admirer,” yesterday’s issue of the Sunday Times, an influential British weekly newspaper, carried an article by Dominic Lawson pointing to a series of surprising anomalies in the Vatican’s handling of its difficult relationship with Xi J(name removed by moderator)ing’s China. Here’s a link, though it won’t be much help because the article is behind a paywall. Here are a few brief excerpts.

Sometimes what isn’t heard makes the oddest impression. As more and more nations have expressed their concern about the growing evidence of concentration camps and even genocide in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, there has been silence from the entity that has the whole of suffering humanity at the core of its mission. I refer to the Holy See.

Pope Francis — who was open in his criticism of Donald Trump’s Mexican “border wall” — has nothing to say about this publicly. Nor, indeed, has the Pope made any public reference to Beijing’s trashing of the judicial independence of Hong Kong. As the preeminent Catholic commentator George Weigel noted last week: “Earlier this month … a Sunday Angelus address in which Pope Francis would express, in the mildest possible way, concerns about the new national security law in Hong Kong and its chilling effects on human rights was distributed to reporters … Then, shortly before the Pope appeared, reporters were told the remarks … would not be made after all.”

We can only imagine what was going on behind the scenes at the Vatican. What we do know is that in 2018 Pope Francis committed the Church to an extraordinary proposal (the full terms of which have never been made public) in which it would concede to the Chinese government —which means the Chinese Communist Party — the right to nominate Catholic bishops. … The replacement of bishops appointed by Rome with those acceptable to Beijing (and previously excommunicated) has caused consternation among faithful Catholics. One priest described it to me as “an act of perfidy, stupidity, and betrayal.” He was addressing his criticism to the Vatican’s secretariat of state. It is not done for Catholics to criticise the Pope directly. …

In 2018 the Pope’s fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, declared: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.” He even argued that, in defending the Paris climate accord, Beijing was “assuming a moral leadership that others have abandoned.” In fact China is not just the world’s most dedicated consumer of coal but also the biggest financier of new coal-fired power stations in other countries. …

It is beyond satire that the Vatican should praise the “moral leadership” of a state that really does act on Karl Marx’s dictum “the existence of religion is the existence of a defect.” This is not just seen in the demolition of churches,

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and the officially sponsored defacing of Catholic imagery — which has increased since the Vatican’s agreement with Beijing. It is most shockingly manifest in what has been happening to the Uighurs — once the Muslim majority in the notionally autonomous province of Xinjiang. …

Births in the Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60 percent from 2015 to 2018. To be clear: the previous policy of forced abortions and imprisonment for those who flouted the state-prescribed family size is now being applied to a minority race, with the intent of erasing their demographic footprint. No wonder this is being described as genocidal; no wonder Jewish newspapers are especially exercised about it. Yet from the Vatican, normally the most vehement supporter of “family life” and the most outspoken critic of voluntary abortions (let alone forced ones), barely a word.
 
Media looking for a new angle to Catholic-bash. When they write an equal number of stories about good things the Vatican does, I’ll pay attention.
 
I can easily imagine it’s the kind of context where saying something could have atrocious repercussions on the lives of Chinese Catholics.

I can’t guess what motivates the Vatican’s course of action, or what kind of intelligence they receive about what happens in the lives of Chinese faithful when the Pope makes an official statement.

But I’m reminded, reading this, of something a South Korean priest told me once about the “official” (Catholic and Protestant) churches in North Korea, attended by some government-sanctioned happy few : “The best thing we could give them is official recognition, because these people cannot be hearing the Gospel Sunday after Sunday, receiving the Eucharist Sunday after Sunday, without being deeply transformed by the Holy Spirit and becoming a powerful source of change for their country which will bear fruits someday”.
 
OddBird said:
I can easily imagine it’s the kind of context where saying something could have atrocious repercussions on the lives of Chinese Catholics.
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Yes, I’ve suspected that too. The Pope likely knows a lot about the situation that we, and this journalist who has a bit of a checkered career and is obviously looking to get his name in the headlines, are not privy to. God will guide him to do what is best and we are called to pray and ignore “journalists” who want to sow discord in order to advance their own careers.
 
He has a long history of pot-stirring. He is also a big pundit for the Daily Mail, which I’m not even allowed to cite on Wikipedia any more.
He’s been criticized as sexist and has basically said poor people need food assistance because they spend all their money on drinking and gambling.
He seems like a reprehensible example of the upper class to me, and I wouldn’t trust anything he wrote.

Perhaps his wife is a good person, but this isn’t about his wife. Plenty of questionable people have had good, even saintly, spouses. I doubt he runs his copy by her for her to approve.

I am leaving this thread now before I become very uncharitable and incur both sins and flags.
 
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He is a former editor of the Spectator and a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, two of Britiain’s most highly respected papers.

What are you talking about?
 
I have many family members in China, some of whom worship within the independent underground churches, others within the state-sanctioned churches. The relationship between the two separate episcopates is awfully complex, but I think three understandings may help to nuance perspectives:

(1) The presence of underground churches is very much contingent upon one’s whereabouts, not all places having such communities, and many Catholics may worship at a state-sanctioned church largely because of the tyranny of distance.

(2) Many state-sanctioned parishes have communities contiguous with those prior to state intervention. That is, those parishes still have Catholics whose families have successively worshipped at that parish for several generations (sometimes numbering over a few hundred years).

(3) Up until quite recently, the Vatican’s approach operated on the assumption that the People’s Republic would go the way of the USSR and other Eastern European communist states: there would soon be a democratic revolution at which point the Holy See can then re-establish communion with separated Catholics without the messiness of negotiating with the PRC government. That has largely proved to be illusory, and any sort of democratisation of China looks to be rather unlikely in the immediate future.

The topic is, of course, extremely polarising. Sometimes I sympathise with the perspective that there is insufficient circumspection in negotiating any sort of arrangement with the PRC, at the same time, I also perceive that there’s a streak of Donatism in an absolute refusal to negotiate. All in all, I thank God that this decision has not fallen to me, and I can only pray for Pope Francis and the episcopate.
 
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire also includes the Wall Street Journal. This is an editorial the Journal published last week that I’d like to read in full if I could, but this, too, is behind a paywall, like Lawson’s Pope article in the Sunday Times. It’s asserting the paper’s refusal to grovel to “cancel culture” pressures from its own journalists.

 
Hi @Bithynian. I try to keep up to date with Church affairs in China by following the Bitter Winter website. Do you consider it a good source? The people there seem to be extremely well informed and up to date. They clearly have a well-organized network of contacts there.

 
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