A 1974 Hymn Called 'Sing Hallelujah to the Lord' Has Become the Anthem of the Hong Kong Protests

BY HILLARY LEUNG / HONG KONG

On a footbridge leading to the Hong Kong’s Legislative Council building, about three dozen people are intoning “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord,” giving barely a pause after the short, four-line verse ends before starting it again.
Around the corner in Tamar Park, by the Central Government Offices, a group is singing the same hymn — and so is another down the road outside the Chief Executive’s Office.
The song is performed as a round.
Its minor-key melody is heard everywhere at the mass demonstrations against Hong Kong’s controversial extradition bill and has become the movement’s anthem.
The reason?
Religious gatherings are exempt from the definition of a “gathering” or “assembly” under Hong Kong’s Public Order Ordinance and are thus more difficult to police.
The Christian hymn was written by the Indiana-born Linda Stassen in 1974.
According to the Complete Book of Hymns, Stassen was a follower of the Jesus People movement and wrote the song as an assignment for a music composition class, with the words inspired by the early Church.
The song has since been included in many Christian hymnals, its popularity stemming from its austere, beautiful simplicity.
Protestors young and old have joined in the singing of the song since taking to the streets on June 9 to oppose the contentious bill.
The proposed legislation would allow China to extradite fugitives from the semi-autonomous enclave for the first time.
The bill’s detractors say Beijing will use it to apprehend dissidents and critics of the communist regime, threatening the city’s cherished freedoms.
The demonstrations have brought the busiest parts of the city to a standstill amid scenes reminiscent of the Umbrella Movement of 2014.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have marched on two consecutive Sundays in a massive repudiation of Beijing.
Organizers say that two million people participated in the last march, out of a population of seven million.
The demonstrations have prompted a suspension of the controversial bill and an apology from the city’s top official, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, in the days after.
Police have also retracted their earlier characterization of the demonstrations as a riot.
However, until the bill is completely withdrawn, protesters vow to continue their actions—and their intonations of “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.”
Non-Christians have also enthusiastically taken up the hymn.
Sherman Cheng, a 22-year-old protester who works in marketing, says she is not religious.
“To me, the song represents Hong Kong people coming together to express the same desires—for our political demands to be met.”
“[The song is] a very good way to express not just an emotion, but our desires in a peaceful, spiritual, religious way,” Catholic priest Cyril Cheung told TIME Monday after leading a round of hymns and bible verses in Tamar Park.
He added that the tune spoke to everyone, regardless of their beliefs.
Christians have been at the forefront of the anti-extradition demonstrations.
The city’s Catholic diocese has issued a statement urging the government not to rush the bill.
Several Christian groups have also voiced concerns about the controversial proposal.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, earlier called for people to come out and join the protests.
“I truly in my heart want all people to fight for our fights in a peaceful way,” Father Cheung said. “It’s our responsibility to stand up and fight for the whole society.”

Beijing's crackdown on religion clouds holiday season for China's faithful

By Joshua Berlinger

Hong Kong -- It's a Christmas battle for the hearts and souls of the Chinese people.
Despite being officially atheist and having a long and antagonistic relationship with religion, the ruling Communist Party is presiding over a boom of Christianity in China.
There are an estimated 72 million to 92 million Christians in the country -- the second-largest faith group after Chinese Buddhists, according to US-based NGO Freedom House.
Some experts claim that China could even become the world's largest Christian country in less than two decades.
Yet on December 9, authorities detained more than 100 Protestant worshipers from the Early Rain Covenant Church in the city of Chengdu.
The church's pastor, Wang Yi, was arrested on allegations of "inciting subversion of state power," according to US-based Christian advocacy group ChinaAid.

Neither China's National Religious Affairs Administration nor local authorities in Chengdu responded to CNN's requests for comment on the case.

Then US President George W. Bush meets with Christian activist Wang Yi (middle) in 2006.

The arrests cap a year-long crackdown on religion in China. 

Dozens of predominantly Protestant Christian churches ruled to have been built or run illegally have been torn down across the country throughout 2018.
Elsewhere, in the western region of East Turkestan, a growing campaign of repression against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group has provoked international condemnation.
Analysts and civil rights advocates say Beijing is intensifying its campaign against worshipers seen as an ideological threat to the party's monopoly on power.
"We are now entering a new era of repression toward two of China's five religions, which is different than what we've seen over the past 40 years," said Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao."

Religion with Chinese characteristics
China is officially an atheist state, and religious practice is under tight government supervision and surveillance.
There are only five state-recognized faiths: Chinese Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism and Taoism.
Worship and religious activity are supervised by state-sanctioned organizations. 

The government appoints major religious leaders and decides where places of worship can be built.
Detention of 100 Christians raises concerns about religious crackdown in China

Worshipers must "uphold the principle that religions in China must be Chinese in orientation and provide active guidance to religions so that they can adapt themselves to the socialist society," according to a government white paper on religious freedoms published earlier this year.
The reason for these restrictions, Beijing claims, is that "foreign religions" such as Catholicism and Protestantism have "long been controlled and utilized by colonialists and imperialists."
China's fractious relationship with organized religion has a long history. 

In the mid-1800s, charismatic cult leader Hong Xiuquan declared himself the brother of Jesus Christ and launched a civil war against the ruling Qing dynasty.
At its height, his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom controlled huge swaths of China before it was eventually defeated by Imperial forces.

A demolished house church is seen in the city of Zhengzhou in central China's Henan province in June.

Local spiritual and religious movements have also been subject to brutal crackdowns.
In 1999, China banned and moved to eradicate the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a faith combining traditional marital arts practices with new-age beliefs. 

At its height, the Falun Gong claimed millions of followers -- and its influence worried the government.
Restrictions on worship help Communists mold religious institutions to their liking, or co-opt them altogether.
Christianity and Islam, Johnson said, are seen as particularly threatening because the party views them as having "strong foreign ties." 

"(That's) even though both religions have long roots in China and are very much localized," he added.

'Country of particular concern'
Outrage grew worldwide in 2018 over the treatment of Muslim-majority Uyghurs in East Turkestan, with hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned in massive concentration camps.
The clampdown on Uyghurs led the US State Department to designate China a "country of particular concern" regarding religious freedom. 

It comes after Chinese officials banned Uyghurs from growing long beards, wearing veils in public places and home schooling their children in 2017.
UN wants access to China's East Turkestan 're-education camps'

"My particular concern now for China is they've increased these actions of persecution against the faith community," Sam Brownback, Washington's ambassador at large for international religious freedom, said earlier this month. 

"China isn't backing away from the religious persecution; it seems to be expanding. This is obviously very troubling."
Former detainees have reported torture and brainwashing inside the detention centers, including forcing inmates to repeat Communist Party propaganda praising Xi Jinping.

A person wearing a white mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uyghurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony in April.

In an interview with Reuters in November, China's ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, said the camps were trying to turn the Muslim-majority inmates into "normal people."
Chinese authorities have refused to grant international monitoring groups and diplomats access to East Turkestan.
While other communist regimes have also been hostile to religion, Johnson said the crackdown on Christianity and Islam was less about the faiths' practices and beliefs and more about the China's ability to control them.
"Under Xi Jinping, the government has further tightened control over Christianity in its broad efforts to 'Sinicize' religion or 'adopt Chinese characteristics' -- in other words, to ensure that religious groups support the government and the Communist Party," Human Rights Watch said in a statement calling for the release of Wang Yi, the Chengdu pastor, and his fellow believers.


China, Vatican deal a 'betrayal'
While some Christians worship legally in government-approved churches, many others attend unregistered underground services.
State-sanctioned Catholic churches are run by bishops chosen and ordained by Beijing, not the Vatican. 

These churches do not recognize the Pope as the ultimate authority in Catholicism, nor does the Holy See recognize Chinese-selected bishops as legitimate.
Opposition grows to controversial deal between Beijing and the Vatican

After decades of chilly relations, the two sides reached a landmark provisional agreement in September that would see them jointly approve China's bishops, a deal that could help lead to the restoration of diplomatic ties between Beijing and the Holy See.
It has drawn swift opposition in Catholic circles. 

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, called it an "incredible betrayal" of the Catholic faith in an interview with Reuters.
Republican US Sen. Marco Rubio, himself a Catholic, asked how the Vatican could justify ceding religious authority to a secular government.
"They are giving a government (an atheist one) influence in choosing bishops which (the Church says) are regarded as transmitters of the apostolic line. How does secular (and atheist) interference in that decision not break that line?" Rubio said on Twitter.
It remains unclear how the Vatican deal will affect Protestant churches like Early Rain, but critics believe it comes from the same playbook as the arrests in Chengdu -- it's all about control.
"This goes back to a broader effort by the government to crack down on anything that can be construed as civil society -- in other words, groups like religious organizations, or NGOs, that are outside government control," Johnson said.

China Reneges on Its Deals. The Vatican Is Learning That the Hard Way.

The disappearance of a bishop is an object lesson in interacting with Beijing.

By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
Children walk down the aisle during Christmas Mass at a Catholic church in Beijing.

As China’s economic and military power has expanded over the past decade, Beijing has shown a proclivity to renege on agreements and to make access to its markets conditional on acceding to its shifting demands. 

Countries, companies, and international organizations have found it difficult to push back.
The Vatican, as both a state and the spiritual head of a major international institution, is now grappling with this challenge. 

In September, the Holy See inked a provisional agreement with Beijing in an attempt to mend an almost 70-year-old schism. 

Vatican leaders argued that the deal would promote unity. 

They insisted that it would enable them to better minister to their Catholic flock in China. 

They dismissed concerns that it constituted “selling out” to a repressive government.
Then a Chinese bishop disappeared. 

The suspected arbitrary detention of a Vatican-appointed priest last month has reinforced worries that Beijing won’t ease its pressure on the Church but will instead use the deal to push for even more control.
The implications stretch well beyond the religious sphere—in fact, the Vatican deal is a broader object lesson in the costs of doing business with Beijing. 

If China is willing to backtrack on its agreement with the Vatican, that bodes poorly for foreign governments, international companies, and other organizations involved in dealmaking with the country.
Since the Vatican and Beijing broke diplomatic ties in 1951, the Church in China has been divided into official state-sanctioned Catholic places of worship with bishops appointed by Beijing, and underground churches whose leaders are secretly appointed by the Vatican but not officially recognized by the Chinese Communist Party. 

CCP authorities have harassed and detained underground clergy, and the dueling bishoprics have caused confusion and division among the laity. 

The pope has not been allowed to visit China or even to enter its airspace.
Vatican leadership suspects that the schism is one reason for Catholicism’s stagnant growth in China. There are about 10 million Chinese Catholics (though estimates vary), a number that has remained relatively steady in recent decades while the number of Protestant Christians has risen dramatically, reaching up to 100 million by some counts. 

That was a major motivation for the deal, which has been under discussion since 2014.
Under the terms of the agreement, which has not yet been fully made public, Francis has recognized seven party-appointed bishops, while Beijing has in turn recognized a portion of the formerly underground Vatican-appointed ones. Wenzhou

In the future, the Holy See is expected to reach a compromise with Beijing over new appointments, in an arrangement that gives the CCP control over who is selected.
But then last month, Shao Zhumin, a Vatican-appointed bishop of the eastern city of Wenzhou, who remains unrecognized by Beijing, disappeared. 

It was the latest in a string of detentions that Shao has faced in recent years. 

Some Chinese Catholics had naively hoped that such arbitrary arrests, a relatively common occurrence for underground priests, would end after the agreement was reached.
“The government has not given up its hope for control. They want the Church to be another tool of the state,” Paul Mariani, a Jesuit priest who researches Chinese religious policy at Santa Clara University, told me. 

“That’s common in China, across labor unions or NGOs—they all have to fall under the party at some level.”
Shao’s disappearance has, so far at least, seemed to vindicate the deal’s naysayers. 

Critics have accused the Vatican of giving in to an atheist, communist government with a long history of persecuting the faithful. 

Joseph Zen, the retired cardinal of Hong Kong and a fierce critic of the CCP, called the agreement “an incredible betrayal,” accusing the Holy See of “giving the flock into the mouths of the wolves.”
Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, told me, “Watching a major world faith come to an agreement with an authoritarian government that’s notorious for repressing religious freedom and to effectively cede some authority to that government sets a very worrying precedent.”
The deal comes as the religious-freedom environment in China has reached its worst level in years, as the government has detained 1 million Muslim citizens in illegal detention camps, banned online Bible sales, increased control over churches and temples, and sought to incorporate party ideology directly into religious doctrine.
“The pope has effectively given Xi Jinping a stamp of approval when the latter’s hostility to religious freedom couldn’t be clearer,” Richardson said, referring to the Chinese president.
It’s not just domestic and religious groups that have felt the tightening grip of the Communist Party. International companies are forced to hand over their proprietary technology in order to do business in China. 

The Chinese government blocks the websites of businesses that do not abide by its tough online censorship laws, leading major companies such as Apple and LinkedIn to comply with official demands to remove certain content. 

In April, Beijing demanded that international air carriers change their website language regarding Taiwan to bring it in line with the Chinese government’s position that the self-governing island democracy is a Chinese province, threatening consequences for airlines that did not comply by a given deadline (to date, almost all airlines have complied).
“It’s hard to imagine China putting as much pressure on those organizations 20 years ago,” said Rush Doshi, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in China at the Brookings Institute. 

“It was afraid of the commercial and international backlash. Now there is less concern about the backlash because China is bigger and more powerful. They couldn’t afford to adopt that attitude when their economy was far smaller than that of the United States.”
In recent years, the CCP has also applied similar pressure to major international institutions such as the United Nations, seeking in some cases to change the very nature of liberal bodies to more closely resemble its own illiberal preferences. 

China has sought to erode human-rights enforcement at the United Nations by packing hearings with pro-Beijing participants, offering generous investment deals to countries in exchange for their support, and blocking activists from entering UN grounds.
“Everyone is being forced to play by Chinese government rules,” said Shanthi Kalathil, who directs the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy. “Increasingly, we see the Chinese government trying to impose its own definition and its own rules on international institutions and other governments. And that extends to governments such as the Vatican, it extends to arenas such as the UN, and to Chinese government bilateral relations with other countries.”

And in some cases, even when an equitable deal has been reached, the party has demonstrated a growing willingness to backtrack on commitments.
In 2015, for example, Xi reached two agreements with President Barack Obama—to reduce cyber-hacking attempts and to cease China’s militarization in the South China Sea. 
Despite these high-profile deals, however, the Chinese navy continued to build military facilities in contested waters in the South China Sea. 
And in October, the U.S. government revealed that Chinese-sponsored cyber-hacking attempts on U.S. targets had once again surged.
“If China can renege on a deal with a superpower—over hacking and over the South China Sea—then it can renege on deals with middle powers or small countries without fear of consequence,” said Doshi.
Xi has spent his six years as president strengthening the party’s grip over every aspect of Chinese society and cracking down harshly on any organization that could potentially compete for the loyalty of Chinese citizens, particularly targeting religious groups.
From that perspective, the agreement with the Vatican is the party’s attempt to finally eliminate the gray area in which underground churches have long operated, rather than a desire to cede partial control over bishop appointments to a foreign head of state thousands of miles away.
“How many times have we seen this movie?” asked Richardson.
“I’m not sure why the pope and the Vatican will succeed when many others have not.”

An Incredible Betrayal

Opposition grows to shameful deal between Beijing and the Vatican

By Ben Westcott

Not only pedophilic

A long-expected, controversial deal between the Chinese government and Catholic leaders in the Vatican has sparked opposition, including inside the Church itself.
The provisional agreement, which will see the Vatican recognize the legitimacy of bishops appointed by the Chinese government, comes at a time when the ruling Communist Party is cracking down on "illegal" Christian groups in the country.
Officially, there are about 6 million Catholics in China, although the real number could be more than twice that when counting followers in so-called underground, or unlicensed churches, according to a researcher with the Holy Spirit Study Center in Hong Kong.
The deal, which is part of Francis's vision to expand the Catholic Church's following across the world, would help the Vatican gain access to potentially millions of converts across China, the world's most populous nation.
But critics have questioned why the church, historically a defender of human rights and Christian values, would willingly join forces the increasingly authoritarian Chinese government, which is officially atheist.
Speaking to Reuters, Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong said the Church's deal was an "incredible betrayal" and accused the Vatican of "giving the flock into the mouths of the wolves."
Previously Chinese Catholic bishops in the state-sanctioned church were not appointed by the Pope, which had been a key sticking point between Beijing and the Vatican since relations broke down in 1951.
Amnesty International China Researcher Patrick Poon told CNN the agreement created serious concerns for freedom of religion in China in the future.
"Such an agreement will effectively set a very bad precedent for other religions (in China) ... It will put Catholics under a lot of pressure," he said.
While the details around the agreement remain vague, including who would have the final say on appointments, Chinese state media was effusive in its support for the proposal.
The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and Bishops' Conference of the Catholic Church in China said in a statement in state media they "wholeheartedly supported" the deal.

Christian devotees attend a mass at the South Cathedral in Beijing on September 22.

Crackdown in China
The Catholic Church has a long and fractious history with the Chinese government, even before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Following's Mao's victory in the civil war, the Communist Party portrayed the Catholic Church as among the hostile forces responsible for the country's decades of suffering and humiliation.

There were even rumors, often discredited, of an assassination plot against Communist leaders involving a Catholic priest.
Even as relations have warmed over the past year, Chinese authorities have been cracking down on "illegal" religion across China, including multiple churches which have been torn down or vandalized.
"Activities in the illegally-built parishes will be prohibited," an Ethnic and Religion Bureau official told the state media tabloid Global Times in April. 

"Other legal Christian activities will remain open."
In April the Bible was pulled from sale in online marketplaces across China, including prominent shoping sites like JD.com and Amazon.cn.
Reports of crackdowns on underground Christian parishes in China continued into September, ahead of the announcement of the deal between Beijing and the Vatican.
In the United States, Republican Senator and frequent China critic Marco Rubio, himself Catholic, asked how the Vatican could justify the deal it had struck with the Communist Party.
"They are giving a government (an atheist one) influence in choosing bishops which (the Church says) are regarded as transmitters of the apostolic line. How does secular (and atheist) interference in that decision not break that line?" Rubio said on his official Twitter.

Concerns in Taiwan
The deal between the Vatican and Beijing is only provisional which means both sides still retain the ability to back out at any time.
The tentative approach isn't surprising. 

Amid reports of resistance among factions on both sides, the deal appears to have been postponed or fallen through multiple times in the past year.
But it is the government in Taiwan who will have looked upon the newly-announced agreement with a particular degree of foreboding.
While Taiwan has been self-governed for almost 70 years following the end of the Chinese civil war, Beijing considers the island to be part of its territory, a breakaway province.
The Vatican is one of Taiwan's last diplomatic allies and its most symbolically important one. 

In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has been working fiercely to turn as many of the island's former friends as possible, leaving them with only 17.
El Salvador was the latest to recognize Beijing and cut ties with Taiwan in August.
While experts have suggested formal diplomatic recognition of Beijing could still be a while away, the tentative deal will certainly provoke concern in Taipei.
"The Vatican has no scruples about abandoning Taiwan," said Cardinal Zen, former Bishop of Hong Kong and a vocal critic of the Beijing government, told CNN in March.

The Manchurian Pope

A Catholic bishop and his rural Chinese parish worry about a deal between Beijing and the Vatican
By Emily Rauhala

Catholics from nearby villages pray and chant in Bobei Catholic Church in Guangdong province, China, on the morning of March 4, 2018. 
LUOTIANBA, China — The bishop can’t really talk about religion right now.
His unofficial church is caught in a fight over the future of the Roman Catholic faith here, a struggle for control between the Vatican and the Communist Party that will determine the fate of the estimated 10 million Catholics in China and shape the legacy of Pope Francis.
Bishop Zhuang Jianjian, 88, under watch and already in trouble, knows it is not safe to speak out. But he can still deliver a sermon.
Just before 7 a.m. on a recent Sunday, he walked to the front of a small, white church in the green hills of Guangdong province and told the story of how God tested Abraham and Abraham kept faith.
In half-empty pews, grandmothers in quilted jackets traced their fingers across the creased pages of their Chinese prayer books. 

Farmers, arriving late, made the sign of the cross. 

For them, and for millions of others, these are testing times.
For decades, the Vatican and the Communist Party have been at odds over Catholicism in China, particularly on the question of who appoints clergy — the Holy See or Beijing.
Vatican-appointed bishops like Zhuang operate underground, which means they are under surveillance and are never totally safe. 

The government-backed Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association chooses leaders for churches of its own.
Now, a deal is in the works. 

The plan would give Francis a say in how bishops are appointed in the People’s Republic. 

In return, the pope would recognize seven bishops who were ordained without Vatican approval.
It is being pitched as a way to restore ties between the Vatican and Beijing and bolster the church at a time when Xi Jinping is cracking down on religion, and Catholicism is losing ground to other faiths.

Villagers farm on their small piece of land in Guangdong province, China, on March 3, 2018. Luotianba Catholic Church stands in the background.

A Mary statue stands in the courtyard of Luotianba Church, which was built in 1840 by a French missionary
It is catastrophic sellout that would put party cadres in charge of communities that have long fought to worship without government control. 

They want the pope to reconsider.
“To join the Patriotic Association is to deny our faith,” said Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong and the deal’s most vocal critic. 

“If the government is managing the church, it is not the Catholic Church anymore.”
In an interview with The Washington Post in Hong Kong, where the church operates relatively freely, Zen confirmed the story that Zhuang could not relate.
In December, the elderly bishop was escorted from Guangdong to Beijing, where a papal delegation asked him to retire to make way for Huang Bingzhang, an excommunicated bishop who also happens to be a member of China’s National People’s Congress.
Zhuang refused. 

Keeping faith
Sitting in the seventh row that morning was a 71-year-old farmer with white hair and worn hands. 

He asked to be identified only by his family name, Cai, for fear of persecution.
On Sundays, Cai walks through fields of cabbage and sweet potato to attend Zhuang’s service. 

Most other evenings, he hosts neighbors in a makeshift chapel on the ground floor of his home.
Cai, like many here, traces his family’s Catholic roots back generations — “five or six, to the time of the Qing dynasty,” he said — when Catholicism established itself in this part of China under French influence in the mid-19th century.
He has seen faith tested. 

And he has seen it survive. 

“You cannot get rid of the Catholic Church,” he said. 

“Catholics are like seeds.”

Old photos of Bobei Catholic Church are framed and hung inside the church in Guangdong province, China.

That, of course, is what China’s leaders fear. 

The Patriotic Association, which was created in 1957, aims to channel Catholics into churches where faith in party, not faith in God, comes first.
While many Catholics in China have joined, millions of others have held out, unwilling to compromise on the primacy of the pope. 

Now, it is the pope who hopes to "unite" them.
The Vatican seems to be betting that regularizing religious practice will revitalize the faith. Catholicism is rooted in China’s countryside, and that has posed an ever larger problem. 

As young people move to the cities, small towns and villages empty out — and so, too, do churches.
At Zhuang’s service, there were perhaps two dozen parishioners: elderly farmers, two teenage girls and one fidgety altar boy who arrived, then zoomed away, on a muddy motorbike.
The villagers of Luotianba spoke carefully, and mostly off the record, to avoid criticizing the government or the church. 

Some said it didn’t matter who the bishop was. 

Others thought it did.

Small Catholic statues are on the shelf of a shop in Bobei village, in Guangdong province, China. About 800 people in the community are Catholic. 
Few seemed pleased about the prospect of change. 

Zhuang, their bishop, was born in this area and, like them, speaks Hakka, a language that is unintelligible to many Chinese. 

The bishop set to replace him, Huang, won’t understand them, Cai worried.
“We don't even know if he’s a bishop at all,” he said. 

“He wasn’t appointed by the church, he was appointed by the government. It will be very difficult for people who truly believe in God to accept this.”
And if the deal goes through? 

Recalling that morning’s service, Cai summoned the sermon on Abraham: “The message is to stick to your beliefs.”

Cutting a deal
Closer to the halls of power, the debate over a deal has been accompanied by secret meetings, open letters and dramatic, last-minute flights to Rome.
That Zen, and other church leaders, are willing to speak so openly is striking — and presents a challenge to the pope.
Efforts at rapprochement did not start with Francis, but he has given the issue greater attention. 

He has taken several chances to send greetings to Xi. 

In a 2016 interview, he wished the Chinese president a happy new year and expounded on the “greatness of the Chinese people.”
Negotiations appeared stuck until earlier this year, when news broke that Zhuang and a second Vatican-appointed bishop had been asked to step down.
Zhuang wrote a letter appealing to the pope and sent it to Zen. 

On the night of Jan. 9, Zen, not trusting Vatican diplomats to deliver his mail, decided to fly from Hong Kong to Rome, he said.
The next day, he arrived late to an audience where cardinals and bishops may kiss the pope’s hands. He handed Francis a translation of Zhuang’s letter, plus a letter of his own.

Catholics from nearby villages pray and chant in Bobei Catholic Church in Guangdong province, China, on the morning of March 4, 2018. 
Prayer books left on the bench of Luotianba Church in Guangdong province, China. 

A man walks into Bobei Church before a prayer in Guangdong province, China, on March 4, 2018. 

On the evening of Jan. 12, the pope received him and he made his case. 

“I was rather disorderly in my talking, but I think I succeeded to convey to the Holy Father the worries of his faithful children in China,” he wrote.
Zen called the deal a betrayal of underground Catholics who had kept faith under tough conditions. “With the deal, you are pushing people who are outside the cage, into the cage — that’s incredible,” he said.
Sister Beatrice Leung, a professor at Taiwan’s Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages and an expert on Catholicism in China, said she reserved judgment, but worried that the Vatican lacked expertise when it came to dealing with China’s government and risked getting “trapped.”
“The Vatican has made a great deal of concessions. I haven’t seen any concession from the Chinese government. That’s why in the outside world, in the free world, there is a lot of opposition,” she said.
An open letter written by a group of influential Catholics argued that the Communist Party had a history of breaking promises when it comes to protecting religious freedom.
“The agreement would not only fail to guarantee the limited freedom desired by the Church,” they wrote, “but also damage the Church’s holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, and deal a blow to the Church’s moral power.”
In Luotianba village, the anxiety about what comes next is palpable — even when it goes unsaid.
“It’s not convenient to talk, forgive me,” Zhuang said that Sunday morning.
“But I will keep my faith.”

Rosary beads left on the bench in Luotianba Church, in Guangdong province, China, on March 4, 2018.

Guerrillas for God

How Hong Kong’s Pastors Are Delivering the Message to China’s Christians

By LAIGNEE BARRON / HONG KONG

An altar server holds a text during a celebration of the Feast of the Ascension at the "underground" Zhongxin Bridge Catholic Church in Tianjin, China on May 24, 2015.

Rev. C. has nearly finished his latest book, a compilation of daily devotions for pastors in China. 

To get his manuscript from Hong Kong into the hands of his students on the Chinese mainland he’ll have to — well, for his safety that can’t be published. 

Neither can his name, since he agreed to speak to TIME on condition of anonymity. 

So let’s just say this slight and soft-spoken Protestant has spent years giving Chinese authorities the slip to deliver his spiritual message to Chinese Christians.
Rev. C. is convinced that Christianity alone can shake the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) indomitable grip. 

He’s willing to go jail for this conviction. 

In fact, he already has.
“It’s a blessing to go to prison,” he says, “to suffer for Jesus.”
He’s not alone. 

While Hong Kong’s pastors are not allowed to proselytize, sermonize or establish churches in mainland China without official permission, many defy these prohibitions to cultivate a network of underground “house churches” in homes and workplaces.
Hong Kong has historically served as the springboard for evangelizing on the mainland. 

But as Xi Jinping kicks off a renewed crackdown to bring Christianity under state control by instituting new religious regulations, pastors in Hong Kong — since 1997 a semi-autonomous Chinese territory — are finding themselves in the crosshairs.
“The Communist Party of China is afraid of this thing. They want to control the Christians,” says Rev. C.

Christianity, he says, has grown too big in the eyes of Beijing, which has historic reason to fear the politicization of religion.
One hundred and sixty-eight years after Christian-inspired rebels nearly brought China’s Qing Dynasty to its knees in the Taiping Rebellion, communist China looks set to host the largest population of Christians in the world by 2030 — a development that is no small source of anxiety for the officially atheist country’s authoritarian leaders.

The Gateway Into China
Proselytizing may be forbidden on the mainland, but step off Hong Kong’s iconic Star Ferry and into the audio and visual assault of ticket touts, digital billboards, souvenir hawkers and street acrobats and you’ll find Christians come to spread the gospel. 

As selfie-stick wielding masses jostle in front of the city’s harbor and glass skyline, leaflets attesting to Jesus’ love and eternal redemption are pressed into the hands of mainland tourists.
Hong Kong, with its greater freedoms and religious liberties, has played a vital role in oxygenating the growth of Christianity on the mainland.
Unlike in many parts of the West where Christianity is waning, a religious gold rush has swept through China since the Cultural Revolution and its fierce suppression of religion ended in 1976. Scholars estimate there are now as many as 80 to 100 million Christians, compared to 89.5 million communist party members. 

As more and more Chinese seek a spiritual alternative to political repression, Christianity continues to gain ground, increasing by an estimated 10% per year.
While Christianity is undoubtedly thriving in mainland China, faith is permitted only in official, “patriotic” churches; unregistered houses of worship may be prolific, but they are also subject to periodic crackdowns. 

According to Christian advocacy group China Aid’s most recent statistics, 1,800 house church leaders were detained in 2016.

Celebrating Easter in China Where Faith Is Curtailed

Parishioners clutch fir branches in place of palm fonds as they pray at an underground Palm Sunday service run by dissident Catholic Priest Dong Baolu in the yard of a house in Youtong village, Shijiazhuang, China, March 20, 2016. 

For these underground congregations — which are illegal, if often ignored — the Hong Kong Christian establishment offers a vital lifeline, supplying everything from monetary support, to Bibles, to blacklisted Christian literature, to training and assistance founding new churches. 

The gospel is smuggled over the border in every format imaginable: broadcast on pirate radio waves and disseminated through USB flash drives.
“They need our help because we are in the freer world and they are not,” says Hong Kong’s retired Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen.
For evangelicals eager to sustain this fount of converts, Hong Kong serves as “the stepping stone into mainland China,” says Rev. Wu Chi-wai, general secretary of the Hong Kong Church Renewal Movement.
More than 60% of Hong Kong’s churches engage in work on the mainland, illicit or otherwise, including preaching and theological training, according to the Church Renewal Movement’s most recent, 2014 survey. 

They do so armed with Bibles, sermons, and, if the work is not officially sanctioned, an arsenal of disguises and convoluted transportation plans to counter omnipresent state surveillance.
Such business can be risky, resulting in anything from police harassment to deportation or detention in “re-education” centers. 

But as Rev. C. says, “Many church leaders believe that if you have not yet been to prison you are not committed enough in your faith.”
While China’s faithful have rapidly multiplied in number, they lack experienced leadership and qualified pastors. 

So Hong Kong has become a central hub for short-term theological intensives, distance Bible seminaries and networking conventions.
“Hong Kong’s role is to help them become a self-propagating, self-administrating establishment,” says another Hong Kong missionary, who, like Rev. C., could not be named for safety reasons.
But the future of this relationship is threatened by a revision of the 2005 religious regulations which came into force last month. 

The 77 vaguely worded provisions indicate the government’s priorities as it doubles down on extralegal worship amid a broader push to cement party-state authority.
For the first time, religious exchanges with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau have become a target. 

China’s house churches were previously barred from “foreign affiliations,” but now any religiously motivated trips abroad must be vetted by Beijing.
“According to the new regulations, believers from mainland China are forbidden to attend unauthorized overseas religious conferences or training, or serious penalties will be imposed. Hong Kong is part of the overseas areas,” says Bob Fu, president and founder of China Aid.
Many Hong Kong pastors are suspending or outright canceling their work for fear of endangering their followers.
“Now is a sensitive time. Many pastors tell me they will have to wait and see how [the regulations] are enforced,” says Rev. Wu.

A “Subversive Seabed”
Many pastors say Beijing’s interference in their work is symptomatic of China’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s political autonomy.
“Beijing sees Hong Kong as place of insurgency, a place that needs to be brought under control,” says Brynne Lawrence, an associate at China Aid.
From China’s perspective, Hong Kong needs to be reintegrated into the mainland, political economist and Hong Kong transition expert Michael DeGolyer writes in The Other Hong Kong Report, a Hong Kong-based academic journal. 

While Hong Kong enjoys greater liberties than the mainland under the “one country, two systems approach” instituted after the 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty, DeGolyer describes this agreement as a temporary transition period during which differences generated during 150 years of separation are to be respected, and overcome.
Rev. Wu says Hong Kong has long been seen as the “subversive seabed” from which provocative ideas — religious or secular — seep into the tightly controlled mainland.
In 1923, nationalist revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen defined Hong Kong as ground zero for resistance.
“Where and how did I get my revolutionary and modern ideas? I got my ideas from this very place, in the colony of Hong Kong,” said Sun, who attended the first independent Chinese church, founded in Hong Kong.

Members of a house church meet for Sunday service May 15, 2011 in Beijing, China.

The enclave has long served as a harbor for agitators and insurrectionists. 

It was a hotbed of communists during the 1920s and ‘30s, a base for Japanese imperialism in the Second World War, a sanctuary for nationalists fleeing the PRC, a refuge for Russian émigrés fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, a home in exile for Indonesia’s national hero and communist leader Tan Malaka, a source of funding, supplies, and ideological encouragement for the Tiananmen Square protesters, a safe haven for NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and, most recently, the birthplace of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. 

Beijing’s flag-waving state media did not fail to note that several Christian leaders helped spearhead those 12-week Occupy protests in 2014.
“[Nobody is] allowed to use Hong Kong for infiltration subversion activities against the mainland to damage its social and political stability,” Zhang Xiaoming, the head of China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, said during a state media interview last year.
The admonition appears to extend to Christian evangelizing.
“They do no want the water from the well poisoning the river,” says Cardinal Joseph Zen.
The Chinese Communist Party has long associated Christianity with subversive Western values, which are perceived as antithetical to Xi’s push for conformity to orthodox party thinking. 

Xi has even said the government “must guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringements by extremists.” 

He advised religions to Sinocize by accepting Chinese traditions and socialist core values, which really means submitting to state authority.

Growing Crackdowns
Religious leaders say hostility toward Christianity peaked under Xi, who became party leader in 2012 and has presided over a crackdown on civil society to quash dissent and establish what academics have termed his complete “controlocracy”.
“They don’t want to totally restrict religion, they want to bring it fully under their control,” says the Hong Kong missionary.
Christian groups say sporadic persecution has intensified and campaigns to demolish unregistered churches, tear down crosses, raid homes for unauthorized gospel literature, arrest church leaders and monitor congregants have all become more common. 

Last November, local authorities in Jiangxi province told residents to take down Christian iconography inside their homes and replace it with portraits of Xi.
The sweeping new religious regulations “try to legitimate the repressive measures adopted in the past few years,” and provide a legal framework for future crackdowns, says Yang Fenggang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University.
Aiming to curb unregistered religious activities, the regulations give underground churches an ultimatum: join the official, antiseptic Three-Self Patriotic churches where faith is subordinate to party dogma, or face criminal repercussions left to local enforcers’ interpretation — traditionally anything from fines, to detention or even enforced disappearances.
“In the U.S., the citizens could say that the law protects us, the first amendment protects our religious freedom. In China it’s the other way around. The law is just to help the government crackdown on the churches,” says Rev. Wu.

A believer prays during a weekend mass at an underground Catholic church in Tianjin in Nov. 10, 2013.

To cope in such a hostile environment, China’s underground churches have adopted guerilla-like tactics. 

Rev. C. described Christians who use balloons to obscure their faces from CCTV cameras while they walk to church, shops that act as fronts for Sunday schools, and coded conversations that allow pastors to talk openly about planting new churches.
“China’s Christians have endured decades of persecution,” Rev. C. says. 

“They know how to deal with the Chinese government.”
Plus, he adds, “Beijing can’t arrest them all. There are too many Christians now and not enough jails.”
It’s Hong Kong’s future, and the ability to adapt to unfamiliar oversight from Beijing that he worries about. 

“We’ve been safe here for the last 20 years. In the coming years? We just don’t know.”
Few religious leaders were optimistic in their forecast for the metropolis.
Cardinal Zen said those who believe in the perpetuity of Hong Kong’s sovereignty under the “two systems” approach are blind to its steady erosion. 

“Here we have no future unless we want to be Beijing’s slaves,” he put it bluntly.
One Christian academic, who asked not to be named, tells TIME that Hong Kong’s liberties — including free expression — are withering fast under the unfavorable attentions of Beijing.
“My worry is that some church leaders in Hong Kong are surrendering,” the academic says. 

“They just obey the government and do whatever they are told, keeping their mouth shut and not daring to criticize policies. You can already see this happening.”

Party vs. Pulpit
Trouble began brewing even before the rollout of the new regulations. 

Mainland Christians were sporadically barred from attending conferences and conventions in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong pastors have increasingly paid a price for trying to spread the gospel beyond the territory’s border.
In 2016, China Aid held a training in Hong Kong attended by over 400 mainland Christians. 

Not long after the event, Fu said three facilitators from the Chinese University of Hong Kong faced repercussions when they tried to visit the mainland: in some cases they were beaten, and in others warned.-
“The authorities have their lists. If you are on the list, you have become a target, and you are not allowed to cross the border,” says Rev. Wu.-
In an unprecedented incident portending the tightening restrictions to come, in 2015, Rev. Philip Woo was summoned from his Hong Kong office across the border. 

Religious affairs authorities there instructed him to stop teaching mainland students, and to stop posting online advertisements offering to ordain mainland pastors. 

Since then, he says he’s also been warned by Hong Kong’s authorities to call off trips to the mainland, where he has been unable to return for over a year.-
“The Chinese government should not be trying to interfere,” he says.-
But for the Communist Party, there are practical reasons to clamp down, says Fenggang, from Purdue University.
Christians, drawn to the faith’s moral compass, “have shown the will to challenge the injustice of the party-state,” he wrote by email. 

“Their presence is a challenge to the moral authority of the party-state. The more the party-state feels the lack of moral authority, the more it [will] try to suppress Christianity.”

Participants raise their hands in prayer during the first Global Chinese Alpha conference in Hong Kong, April 10, 2007.

Yet paradoxically, the more severe the persecution, the more people are drawn to Christianity.
“By clamping down on it, the Communist Party has multiplied it,” says Carsten Vala, chair of the political science department at Loyola University.
He also noted that while most Chinese Christians are not interested in seizing political power, Christianity and communism are inherently at odds, competing over the souls and loyalties of the people.
“Protestants have arguably created the most sustained structural challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s ordering of society,” Vala says.
Rev. C. says he is motivated by the belief that if Christianity continues to grow in China, it’s conceivable that 20-25% of the country could be Christian. 

At that point, he says, “the Communist Party will not be able to handle it.”
“With Christianity [there will be] morals, ethics, just laws, and a will to enforce it,” he says.”

Only Christianity can change this country.”

The Manchurian Pope

Hong Kong Catholics Condemn China-Vatican Deal
By Suzanne Sataline

About 200 Catholics attend a prayer meeting for the Chinese Church after news emerge that Beijing and the Vatican have reached a deal on bishop appointments, in Hong Kong, China, Feb. 12, 2018.
HONG KONG — At a recent all-night prayer vigil, nearly 100 Roman Catholics gathered in a church ground floor chapel to pray the rosary in Cantonese for their fellow worshippers in mainland China.
On their minds as they recited the prayer: a possible deal between the Holy See and China's communist leaders that is worrying many Catholics.
Lucia Kwok, a care worker stepped out of the chapel and spoke of her dismay over the recent news. Francis, she said, was making deals with the government in China. 

“We don’t trust the PRC because they are dishonest. They lie, they do bad things and never keep their promises,” Kwok said. 

“China is not worth our trust.”
Many Catholics in Hong Kong are confused and upset with the Vatican’s recent steps to resume relations with the Chinese government even as Beijing has continued to silence critics.
In the nearly seven decades since its establishment, the People's Republic of China has not had formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See, a condition rooted in the Vatican's tradition of appointing its bishops worldwide — a practice the mainland Chinese leadership has historically viewed as interference in its internal affairs.

Cross-bearers process through the church grounds during a Christmas Eve mass at the Southern Cathedral, an officially-sanctioned Catholic church in Beijing, Dec. 24, 2015.
Patriotic Catholic Association
China's Catholics have been allowed to practice their religion under a government-supervised entity known as the Patriotic Catholic Association in which the government officially names bishops. 

Some — but not all — of those bishops have been quietly approved by the Vatican as well.
The Holy See has considered sacraments administered in the patriotic church valid, but the existence of the entity and the government's tight control of it has for decades has prompted many observant Catholics to practice their faith in a parallel, "underground" Catholic church, whose members see themselves as true followers of the church in Rome. 

The underground church is declared illegal and its members have been routinely subjected to arrest and ruthless persecution.
Believers take part in a weekend mass at an underground Catholic church in Tianjin.
An agreement between the Holy See and the Chinese government would allow the Vatican to operate more openly in China, but grant greater control to Beijing over the church's decisions.

Zen expresses frustration
At the prayer gathering in Hong Kong, Kwok’s frustration was echoed by Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired bishop of Hong Kong and a longtime critic of Beijing, who prayed quietly with the group.

In recent weeks he has termed any agreement between the Vatican and Beijing that would allow China control over the church as “evil.”
Retired archbishop of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen gestures during an interview in Hong Kong, Friday, Feb. 9, 2018.

News reports have said the agreement would legitimize the government-appointed bishops and force those in the underground church to retire. 

The reports say the pope in Rome would have a final say over the approval of bishops, but Zen has voiced concern that Beijing would only name bishops loyal to the communist leadership.
In this Jan. 10, 2018 photo made available the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, retired archbishop of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen hands a letter to Francis at the end of his weekly general audience.

“It’s something important for the whole church, this attitude of fidelity and disrespect for our faith. The faith and the discipline. It’s a very serious matter to disregard centuries of doctrine,” Zen said. “They want everybody to come into the open and obey the government. They never say how they would deal with bishops in the underground. It’s obvious what they are going to do… They will not only eliminate bishops, but in some dioceses have no bishop, but some kind of [government] delegate.”
The Vatican has asked Catholics for time to work out details. 

Francis, speaking to reporters in early December, said: “It’s mostly political dialogue for the Chinese Church… which must go step by step delicately,” he said. 

“Patience is needed.”

Changing political landscape
Several Catholics in Hong Kong have said the move can be seen as an appeasement, coming at a fraught moment when China has grown more authoritarian under Xi Jinping.
On Sunday, China’s ruling party announced it would end presidential term limits, an extraordinary move by a government that sought to avoid the dangerous one-man control exerted by former leader Mao Zedong. 

The move will, in effect, allow Xi to serve for life. 

During his five years in office, Xi’s policies have attacked economic corruption as well as curtailed the work of human rights attorneys, labor organizers, investigative journalists and bloggers.
In December, the Vatican asked two bishops in the underground church in China to relinquish their roles to men approved by the government. 

Vatican envoys asked Bishop Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou to step down and cede control to Huang Bingzhang, an excommunicated bishop and a member of China’s acquiescent legislature, the National People’s Congress, according to asianews.it.
Guo Xijin, another underground bishop in Fujian province, was asked to serve as an assistant to Zhan Silu, another government appointed bishop. 

Previously, the Vatican had said that both men had been elevated illegally by the government.
Opponents see it as an unusual intrusion, even violation, of the church’s authority. 

They are also concerned about signs that the government has restricted religious practice, such as orders that followers not bring children to worship.
News of the Vatican’s negotiations prompted several professors to start a petition against any agreement that would cede control to Beijing. 

More than 2,000 people have signed.
“We think the Catholic Church has appeal [for] the Chinese people exactly because it has refused to compromise with the Chinese authority,” said Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, a retired political science professor in Hong Kong, and one of the petitions organizers. 

“The first Christians of China were the very, very poor peasants in the cultural revolution days. My argument is if the Vatican makes a compromise with Beijing, the Catholic church loses that moral and spiritual appeal. And it doesn’t benefit the church.”

Xi Jinping's Pope

Online petition opposing China-Vatican deal was hit by cyber-attack
Christian Today 

The Catholic Church now has a Manchurian Pope

An online petition opposing an agreement between the Chinese government and the Vatican was subject to a cyber attack on February 14, it has emerged.
According to a statement from the group Free Catholics in China, a denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on its website meant that it did not resume normal service until the following day, the Catholic Herald reported.
'We will not be cowed into silence by such attack, and we will never stop voicing out for the Church,' the group said.

The controversial Vatican-China deal is reportedly set to be reached by next month. 

Chinese Catholics are divided between those in the 'underground' Church who are loyal to the pope and the government-backed Catholic Patriotic Association, which appoints bishops without Rome's approval.
The open letter published on the website is signed by named Catholics mainly in Hong Kong and also in the US and the UK. 

It says: 'We are deeply worried that the (proposed) deal would create damages that cannot be remedied.'
The 15 lawyers, academics and human rights activists who have signed the open letter express dismay at an agreement which would involve the Vatican recognising seven bishops appointed by China's Communist party.
The letter censures the appointment of seven bishops by the Chinese state, not the pope, adding that the bishops' 'moral integrity is questionable'.
The letter, published on the influential site Asia News and elsewhere, says: 'We are worried that the agreement would not only fail to guarantee the limited freedom desired by the Church, but also ... deal a blow to the Church's moral power. Please rethink the current agreement, and stop making an irreversible and regrettable mistake.'
The letter to bishops around the world came less than two weeks after Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, accused the Vatican of 'selling out', writing in a blog post: 'Do I think the Vatican is selling out the Catholic Church in China? Yes, definitely, if they go in the direction which is obvious from all what they are doing in recent years and months.'
Last month, the Vatican asked two underground bishops to give up their positions in favour of government-appointed counterparts, one of whom was excommunicated by Rome in 2011.
A petition attached to the letter had been signed by 1,600 people as of last week.
The cyber-attack happened within hours of widespread international publicity about the open letter.

The Vatican's Quisling: Francis Is Playacting Realpolitik

The Vatican’s diplomacy with authoritarian China is based on a century-old fantasy of its worldly power.
BY GEORGE WEIGEL

Xi Jinping's Pope or Vatican's Quisling?

In recent weeks, many observers have been deeply disturbed by what appears to be an impending deal between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China. 

The agreement would concede a significant role to the Chinese Communist regime in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in China, as a step on the path to full diplomatic relations between Beijing and the Holy See. 

More than a few questions have been raised about such an arrangement.
Why would the Vatican trust any agreement cosigned by a totalitarian power, given its previous unhappy experiences with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich, both of which systematically violated concordats they concluded with the Holy See?

Why have the Vatican’s diplomats (and Francis himself) dismissed warnings from within China, and from the retired bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, about the negative impact of such a deal on those Chinese Catholics who have remained loyal to Rome rather than to the regime-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Association?
Why would the Church violate its own canon law (according to which “no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation, or designation of bishops are conceded to civil authorities”) as a step toward full diplomatic exchange with a regime that routinely violates human rights with great cruelty?
What has motivated the dogged pursuit by Vatican diplomats of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and China over the past four decades?
Answering these questions requires three steps back: first to 1870, then to 1929, and finally to 1962.
In 1870, when the forces of the Italian Risorgimento captured Rome and made it the capital of a unified Italy, the last vestiges of the old Papal States (which once encompassed all of central Italy) disappeared, and Pope Pius IX retired behind the Leonine Wall, styling himself the “Prisoner of the Vatican.” 

The Holy See, which international law and customary diplomatic practice have long recognized as the juridical embodiment of the pope’s role as universal pastor of the Catholic Church, continued to send and receive ambassadors even as it lacked any territory over which it exercised internationally recognized sovereignty. 

But Pius’s four successors tried nonetheless to reach an agreement with the new Italian state that would guarantee the pope’s independence from all earthly powers.
That goal was finally achieved by Pius XI in the 1929 Lateran Accords, which created the independent Vatican City State on a 108-acre tract surrounding St. Peter’s Basilica.
But while the Lateran Accords assured the pope’s freedom to conduct his global ministry without interference from another sovereign, the reduction of the pope’s sovereign territory to the Vatican City microstate underscored that, in the future, Holy See diplomacy would have to reply on the exercise of papal moral authority, not the usual tangible instruments of state power.
The largely Italian Vatican diplomatic service never quite grasped this implication of the Lateran Accords, though. 

Rather, it seems these foreign-policy professionals continued to think that the new Holy See/Vatican City was something like the old Holy See/Papal States: a third-tier European power. 

And as Italy itself became a less serious actor in world politics, it was natural for Italian papal diplomats to seek some significant role for “Rome” on the global stage, working the system as other third-tier powers did.
Then came October 1962. 

It has been insufficiently remarked that the opening of the Second Vatican Council — the four-year meeting of all the world’s Catholic bishops that became the most important event in Catholic history since the Reformation and set the foundations for Catholicism’s current role as a major institutional promoter and defender of human rights — coincided precisely with the Cuban missile crisis. 

Pope John XXIII and the Vatican diplomatic corps were sufficiently shaken by the possibility of a nuclear war that might have ended Vatican II before it got underway that they devised a profound redirection of Vatican diplomacy toward the European communist world. 

This became known as Vatican Ostpolitik, and its principal agent was the career Vatican diplomat Archbishop Agostino Casaroli.
Casaroli’s Ostpolitik, which unfolded during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), aimed at finding a modus non moriendi, a “way of not dying” (as Casaroli frequently put it), for the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain. 

In order to appoint bishops, who could ordain priests and thus maintain the Church’s sacramental or spiritual life under atheist regimes, the Vatican ended the anti-communist rhetoric that had characterized its public diplomacy in the 1950s, removed senior churchmen who refused to concede anything to communist governments (like Hungary’s Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty and Czechoslovakia’s Cardinal Joseph Beran), discouraged any public role for exiled Catholic leaders like Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, urged underground Catholic clergy and laity to cease their resistance to their local communist regimes, and diligently sought various forms of agreements with communist governments. 

One premise informing this remarkable volte-face was that the Vatican’s once-harsh anti-communist rhetoric had been at least partially to blame for communist regimes’ persecution of the Church; the theory was that if the Vatican showed itself more accommodating (the buzzword was “dialogue”), such mellowness would be reciprocated.
It wasn’t. 

And by any objective measure, Casaroli’s Ostpolitik was a failure — and in some instances a disaster.
In Rome, it led to the deep penetration of the Vatican by East bloc intelligence services, a counterintelligence debacle (now fully documented from original sources) that put the Church’s diplomats in an even weaker position in negotiations with their communist counterparts, who frequently knew the Vatican game plan thanks to the work of well-placed moles and informers inside the Roman Curia.
In the countries that were to be the putative beneficiaries of the Ostpolitik, there were no improvements of consequence as a result of Casaroli’s shuttle diplomacy, and in fact more damage was done. 

The Hungarian Catholic hierarchy became what amounted to a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hungarian state, which of course meant the Hungarian communist party. 

Repression increased in what was then Czechoslovakia, with regime-friendly faux-Catholic organizations achieving public prominence while underground bishops and priests worked as janitors, window-washers, and elevator repairmen, conducting clandestine ministries at night. 

The Ostpolitik did nothing to improve the situation of Catholics in the Soviet Union: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church remained the world’s largest illegal religious community, and Lithuanian Catholic resistance leaders found themselves doing hard time in gulag labor camps.
The Ostpolitik had no serious effect in Poland, however, where the wily primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and the charismatic archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, nodded politely to visiting Vatican diplomats but continued to confront the Polish communist authorities with vigorous public protests when they thought that necessary to preserve the Church’s tenaciously held free space in a communist state. 

That strategy, in turn, strengthened the most vigorous national Catholic community in the Soviet sphere, even as the Vatican Ostpolitik was weakening local Churches in other Warsaw Pact countries.
When Wojtyla was elected pope in 1978, taking the name John Paul II, the Casaroli Ostpolitik was quietly buried — although the shrewd John Paul appointed Casaroli his secretary of state, thus creating something of a good cop-bad cop strategy. 

Casaroli would continue his shuttle diplomacy in east-central Europe. 

But that, John Paul understood, would provide him useful cover as he, using the megaphone of the papacy, boldly challenged communist human rights violations in his pilgrimages all over the world, most notably on his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979, and then in October of that year from the rostrum of the General Assembly of the United Nations. 

That two-track strategy was instrumental in igniting the revolution of conscience that shaped the Revolutions of 1989 and the self-liberation of east-central Europe from communism.
Yet the lessons that ought to have been learned from all this — that the Ostpolitik was a failure because the appeasement of communist and other authoritarian regimes never works, and that the only real authority the Holy See and the pope have in world politics today is moral authority — were not learned by the heirs of Agostino Casaroli, many of whom are influential figures in Vatican diplomacy today. 

At Rome’s Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the Ostpolitik is still presented to future Vatican diplomats as a model of success, and at no level of the Vatican Secretariat of State has there been an intellectual reckoning with the evidence demonstrating the failures of Casaroli’s diplomacy.
The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as Francis in March 2013 has not changed the “Casarolian” cast of mind dominating Vatican diplomacy; quite the opposite, in fact. Bergoglio brought to the papacy a record of resistance to the authoritarian Kirchner regime in his native Argentina, with which he had tangled on several issues. 

But he had no experience of world politics, and from the outset of his pontificate, Francis made it clear that he believed that “dialogue,” perhaps his favorite word when speaking of international affairs, is possible with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and Raúl Castro.
Thus under Francis, the accommodating Casaroli approach to Vatican diplomacy has made a great comeback, while the world-changing achievements of John Paul II, the result of charismatic moral leadership, seem to be virtually ignored by the Church’s senior diplomats. 

And one result of that comeback is the new démarche with China, which the senior Italians among the Vatican’s diplomats regard as a rising world power with whom they must be a “player.”
John Paul and his successor, Benedict XVI, could have had the deal now being proposed by Beijing, or something very similar to it. 

Both declined, because they knew it was not a step toward greater freedom for the Catholic Church in China but a step toward greater Catholic subservience to the Chinese Communist regime, a betrayal of persecuted Catholics throughout the People’s Republic of China, and an impediment to future evangelism in China. 

Both may also have weighed the fact that any formal Vatican diplomatic exchange with Beijing would necessitate ending diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the first Chinese democracy in history — and that would be a bad signal to the rest of the world about the Vatican’s commitment to Catholicism’s own social doctrine.
Vatican diplomacy today rests on shaky and insecure foundations — and on Italianate fantasies that the 21st-century Holy See can act internationally as if this were 1815, when Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Pope Pius VII’s chief diplomat, was a significant actor at the Congress of Vienna. 

Those shaky foundations and that fantasy are not a prescription for diplomatic success. 

They are, rather, a prescription for both diplomatic and ecclesiastical failure, which is the likely result of the deal now being bruited between the Vatican and China.

Vatican's Crypto-Communism: Francis Kowtows to China

In capitulating on the issue of bishop appointments, the Vatican loses a 1,000-year struggle.
BY WILL INBODEN

Henry IV, king of the Germans, surrenders his crown to Pope Gregory VII, who sits enthroned. (Woodcut by John Foxe/Rare Books and Manuscripts Library/Ohio State University Libraries/Wikimedia Commons)

While the Winter Olympics in South Korea are dominating the headlines from Asia this week, surreptitious negotiations now taking place in Beijing may prove more consequential for the eventual course of the 21st century. 

According to news reports, the Vatican might be nearing an agreement with the Chinese government that would lead to mutual diplomatic recognition between Beijing and Rome. 

However, the agreement would be entirely on Beijing’s terms, with the Holy See ceding authority to the Chinese Communist Party for the appointment of bishops and granting the party effective control of the Catholic Church in China. 

If true, that would amount to a stunning unilateral concession by Francis rather than a negotiated compromise.
The geopolitical stakes are enormous, embroiling the world’s largest nation of 1.4 billion and the world’s largest religious group of 1.2 billion. 

The population overlap between the two is small — there are only 10 million or so Catholics in China, split between the underground church and the one church controlled by Beijing — numbers that pale in comparison to the estimated 70 million or more (perhaps many more) Chinese Protestants.
Yet the resolution of this dispute will do much to shape whether China continues to be ruled by an officially atheistic and increasingly aggressive government, or begins to evolve in a more pacific and liberal direction.

For readers unfamiliar with Catholic theology and church governance, this is not a mere administrative trifle but an issue central to Catholicism’s beliefs, identity, and history going back millennia. 
One of medieval Europe’s most cataclysmic events came with the investiture controversy of the 11th century over whether emperors or popes had the authority to appoint bishops and priests.
The dispute climaxed in 1076 and 1077, when Emperor Henry IV, the German monarch, failed in his challenge to Pope Gregory VII, and the humiliated emperor found himself instead a supplicant standing in the snow outside the pope’s palace at Canossa, groveling for forgiveness and conceding the church’s authority over religious offices.
The issue lies at the core distinctions between church and state.
Churches and other religious organizations have the authority to choose their own clergy, determine their theology, and govern themselves in spiritual matters, while respecting and deferring to the authority of the state in political matters.
In the case of bishops and priests, Catholic teaching holds them to be Christ’s representatives here on earth, the successors of the original Apostles, whose highest loyalties are to the Pope and ultimately to Christ in heaven.
As a Protestant in the reformed tradition who holds to the priesthood of all believers, I myself do not have any ecclesial stake in the current negotiations between Beijing and the Vatican.
But as an American who believes in religious liberty, human rights, and not capitulating to the pretensions of an aggressive atheistic government that seeks to squelch any independent civil society, I find the Vatican’s reported concessions of serious concern.
So do many Catholics.
The estimable George Weigel, a leading Catholic intellectual and a biographer of Pope John Paul II, wrote in a piece for Foreign Policy:
John Paul and his successor, Benedict XVI, could have had the deal now being proposed by Beijing, or something very similar to it. 
Both declined, because they knew it was not a step toward greater freedom for the Catholic Church in China but a step toward greater Catholic subservience to the Chinese Communist regime, a betrayal of persecuted Catholics throughout the People’s Republic of China, and an impediment to future evangelism in China. 
Both may also have weighed the fact that any formal Vatican diplomatic exchange with Beijing would necessitate ending diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the first Chinese democracy in history — and that would be a bad signal to the rest of the world about the Vatican’s commitment to Catholicism’s own social doctrine.
Weigel’s points highlight the especially sensitive issue of the seven Chinese bishops who had previously been appointed by the government over the fierce objections of previous popes who actually excommunicated at least some of those faux-bishops.
The provisional agreement between the Holy See and Beijing would reverse those excommunications and affirm those bishops as legitimate appointments. 
This is why so many Catholics who have stayed faithful to the Vatican through supporting China’s persecuted underground Catholic Church are remonstrating against the proposed deal.
Witness this open letter to Francis, for example.
One of those faithful Chinese Catholics who has maintained his loyalty to Rome and been a courageous voice for democracy and human rights is Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong.
Based on decades of firsthand experience trying to shepherd his flock and protect it from Beijing’s encroachments, the wily cardinal has spoken out against the Vatican’s concessions, and even reportedly traveled to Rome the other week to appeal to Francis.
I was privileged to meet Zen in 2007 when as a National Security Council staff member I helped set up a visit between him and President George W. Bush in the White House residence.
Their meeting sparked the ire of Beijing, which then as now regarded the cardinal as an irksome troublemaker, but it also helped demonstrate to China that the United States stood with those around the world advocating for democracy and human rights in their own countries.
Previous American presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush enjoyed close relations with their papal counterparts, especially when John Paul occupied the papacy.
Unfortunately Francis does not inherit his predecessor’s steadfast opposition to tyranny, nor has President Donald Trump yet taken up the mantle of America’s historic support for freedom abroad.
The distaste the two hold for each other also limits the White House’s ability to quietly sway Rome away from its embrace of Beijing.
The newly confirmed ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, Sam Brownback, is a devout Catholic with strong Vatican ties, so hopefully he is already engaging in some vigorous quiet diplomacy with the Holy See to forestall this looming capitulation to China.
Meanwhile, perhaps Trump could also invite Zen back for a return visit to the White House.