China Deal...what now?

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berniemcken

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Could someone please explain now what the Chinese faithful are to do now that the Church has linked itself with the communist government in China? Am I looking at this correctly? Please help me understand this. Bad things are going to happen because of this, right?
 
Someone from China even spoke about this in one of the other forums on CA. One would have to track that down. There are a number of China threads that show up from time to time. Often, being addressed more in other sub-forums such as in social justice or something. The person alleged to be from China here, I have no reason to doubt that they are, did not like the present situation.
 
Basically the Vatican has created a situation where they have legitimized the Chinese Patriotic Church and its “sinicization” of the gospel that glorifies the communist Chinese government and at the same time has delegitimized the priests, bishops, and laypeople who have suffered persecution for decades in China. Catholics who have been faithful to the Pope and to the teachings of the church are now pressured to join what has up til now been the fake, state run Catholic Church in China. So the Vatican has tacitly agreed to the persecution of Catholics in China. Don’t worry though, this helps people worship peacefully and without fear, or something.
 
If I could add. Bad things are happening in China, and they have been, and they will continue to be. Will some of that be due to this agreement? probably. Without this agreement would bad things happen? yes. We can disagree with the Vatican’s agreement with the Chinese government, but we should not attribute it to some sort of evil desire on the part of the Holy See to hurt the Church in China. It is an effort, not the first of its type and won’t be the last, to help maintain the sacramental life of the Church in China to the best extent possible under a totalitarian government. And we should understand the situation of the Church in China before coming to any conclusion.
I actually disagree with the author’s conclusion in the link I posted, but he does an honest job of explaining the situation of the Church in China. Much more so than most people who have been condemning this agreement.

Hint: anyone who describes two churches in China: an underground church and a state church is wrong.
 
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From the article I linked:
The most common question I receive about the Church in China is, “Aren’t there two communities in China: a ‘true Church’ that exists underground and a ‘false church’ that is run by the communist party?”

This assumption has been disseminated for several decades, and it has served more to confuse than clarify the reality of one, but somewhat divided, Catholic Church in China. There is no such thing as a “state-run Catholic Church” in China; there is a state-monitored association, the CCPA, that was established to oversee how Catholics worship. The tension in China, if there is much tension at all nowadays, between the so-called “underground” and “aboveground” Catholic communities has not been about whether one community is more or less “Catholic” than the other, but rather around the question of “selling out” to state influence over the day-to-day operations of Catholic life—especially regarding the issue of how bishops are selected and ordained. Chinese Catholics view themselves as part of “one suffering Catholic Church” that is still working out how its two communities can come to an agreement about how to best practice the Catholic faith under a communist government.
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Few non-Chinese know that priests and bishops in many—perhaps most—Roman Catholic dioceses in China collaborate in the administration and evangelization of their regions. One example will serve to illustrate how this operates. In the diocese of Guiyang, the state-recognized ordinary of the diocese was Andrew Wang Chongyi (1919-2017), who died last year as the administrator of the diocese at the age of 97. The unregistered, “underground” bishop during Wang’s service was Bishop Augustine Hu Daguo (1921-2011). When I met these two bishops—one “aboveground” and the other “underground”—I merely had to cross the hall at the bishops’ residence; both men lived in the same building and served their respective communities in a spirit of fraternal collaboration.
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