Vatican's Crypto-Communism

THE VATICAN’S CHINA WHITEWASH

By Daniel Mark

Like many others, I received with skepticism the news of a possible deal to resolve the long-standing dispute between China and the Vatican concerning the appointment of bishops and other ecclesial matters. 

I recognize the need for measured dissent, since none of us can say definitively what approach will, in the long run, be best for the Catholic Church in China. 

But cautious deference to the insiders’ greater experience in diplomacy and knowledge of the deal’s particulars does not lessen my dismay and bewilderment at recent remarks by Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. 

Speaking to Vatican Insider, Sorondo opined: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.”
Sorondo’s comments throughout the interview range from naïve to ludicrous, and they verge on an apology for one of the world’s most repressive regimes. 

The bishop lauds China for its lack of shantytowns, as though the country’s widespread poverty were a secret. 

The absence of drug use among China’s young, which the bishop cites, is about as plausible as the absence of homosexuals in Iran claimed by that country’s former president. 

And in praising China’s implementation of Laudato Si’ and defense of the Paris Climate Accord, Sorondo seems oblivious to Beijing’s famously awful smog. 

“What people don’t realize,” the bishop muses, “is that the central value in China is work, work, work.” 

What the bishop doesn’t realize is that China is a totalitarian state.
There is no end to what could be said about China’s atrocious record on human rights, from the forced repatriation of North Korean refugees to the detention of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo, who died in custody in July without adequate treatment for his liver cancer. 

But let me leave aside the restrictions on political and economic liberty and stick with a subject I follow closely—religious freedom—which should be of special concern to the Church (and to all people who affirm the moral principles of Dignitatis Humanae).
The recent Communist Party conference in China entrenched the incumbent leader and his eponymous ideology, Xi Jinping Thought. 

This ideology entails the “sinicization” of religion, a process of manipulating and subduing faith so as to render it compatible with the state’s totalitarian aims. 

The brand-new Regulations on Religious Affairs strike at believers by tying religion to extremism, including separatism and terrorism, thereby providing the pretext for suppressing almost any religious activity. 

Practitioners of Falun Gong, like some other groups labeled “cults,” are already familiary with this tactic. 

They are victims of some of Beijing’s worst abuses, having long been subjected to the evil of organ harvesting. (A Chinese representative participated prominently in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ February Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism—to some protests.)-
Uyghur Muslims in China’s west are banned from fasting during Ramadan, attending mosque if they are under age eighteen, growing beards deemed “abnormal,” and even giving certain Muslim names to their children. 

The government confiscates their Korans and prayer mats and even places minders in their homes, to ensure that they do not pray or fast. 

China’s war on Tibetan Buddhists is well known. 

The government uses its influence internationally against the Dalai Lama. 

The Panchem Lama was detained by authorities at age six, more than twenty years ago, and his whereabouts remain unknown. 

This past summer, officials demolished much of Larung Gar, the main center of Tibetan Buddhist learning, leaving thousands of monks and nuns homeless. 

Similar destruction then took place at the Yachen Gar center.
Christians in China have likewise faced persecution, not least from the government’s assault on affiliation with underground churches. 

In January, the government razed a megachurch serving fifty thousand worshipers. 

In Zhejiang Province, authorities have waged a long campaign to remove crosses from the tops of churches, with the “decapitations” numbering around two thousand. 

In early 2017, the pastor of the unregistered Living Stone Church was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for “divulging state secrets,” and a former deacon was sentenced to five years for “illegal business operations.” 

In May, the government detained underground Catholic Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou—his fourth detention since the previous September. 

Even for state-approved entities, surveillance, harassment, and violence complement the government’s usual regimen of registration and regulation of all church activity. 

With China’s autocrats deeply fearful of the spread of Christianity in their country, these are just a few examples of the repression they perpetrate.
A friend of mine who is an astute commentator on Church affairs speculated that Bishop Sorondo’s words were intended to burnish China’s image and thereby put the pending deal in a better light. 

If that’s the case, then the Vatican is taking the wrong approach to its messaging. 

If Church leaders wish to defend a rapprochement, they should first acknowledge that the communist dictatorship’s treatment of believers is harsh and unpredictable, and then argue that, under the circumstances, this is the best way to move forward: A deal will increase the Vatican’s control over the Church in China, open the door to further normalization of relations with China and regularization of the Church there, and bring some much-needed relief to the faithful. 

This argument might prove unpersuasive, but at least the bishops would not be peddling what I will understatedly call a whitewash.
As Hadley Arkes taught us thirty years ago in the book that became this magazine’s namesake, in politics the critical thing is the character of the regime. 

To deny the brutal, authoritarian character of the Chinese regime can only serve to blind the Vatican’s diplomats to the real nature of their interlocutors and, thereby, vastly increase the risk of error. 

The Church should stand as a witness against an ideology that claims the whole of human life for itself—that demands that all be rendered unto Caesar. 

At least it should not flatter Caesar unduly.

Vatican's crypto-communism

Reality checks in Rome are badly needed these days. 
By George Weigel

Xi Jinpings' “useful idiot” Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.

Despite the media and blogosphere attention he attracts, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a 75-year-old Argentine who is chancellor of various pontifical academies, is a small-bore bit player in the current drama of what friends and critics alike regard as an increasingly dysfunctional Vatican. 
Yet when someone of even his relative insignificance announces that “right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” that dysfunction comes into sharp relief — and a correction of the record is imperative. 
Catholic social doctrine is built on four foundational principles: the inviolable dignity and value of every human person, the responsibility of all to exercise their rights in ways that contribute to the common good, the importance of social pluralism and civil society (and thus the rejection of totalitarianism), and the imperative of solidarity (the virtue of civic friendship that binds free societies together). 
Those principles helped shape the revolution of conscience that preceded and helped make possible the political revolution of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. 
Those principles were also in play in the democratic transformations of Latin America and East Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century. 
Those principles remain the core of the social doctrine of the Church today.
And in 2018, those principles are systematically denied, in both theory and practice, by the People’s Republic of China. 
Bishop Sánchez Sorondo seems to have been much impressed by a recent tour of the PRC, noting in an interview that the Chinese “do not have shantytowns” and Chinese young people “do not take drugs,” which he attributed to a “positive national conscience.” 
In that same interview, the Argentine prelate also managed to get in a dig at El Norte, claiming that, in China, “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States.” 
What the bishop evidently did not see, or conjure with, during his tour were the following:

• There are over 1,000 laogai camps spread across China, where slave labor is the rule and political prisoners are frequently murdered, so their transplantable organs can be harvested to benefit the more politically reliable members of the population. 
• In China, the state, not a husband and wife, determine the number of children a couple can have, and while the notorious one-child policy has been replaced by a two-child policy, the regime continues to insist that official cadres, not parents, decide on the number of children a family may welcome.
• To enforce its internal population policies, the Chinese state claims the right to conduct compulsory abortions when women become pregnant in violation of state-determined birth quotas — a grotesque cruelty regularly practiced in the PRC today. 
• China’s draconian population-control policies have resulted in what amounts to a genocide of unborn baby girls, which has resulted in the most imbalanced boy-to-girl ratio of any country on the planet. 
• China’s people have no right of free movement within their own country, as the ministry of public security assigns every subject of the regime an official residence, a hukou, which is usually the home of one’s parents; yet many Chinese do move away from their hukou, making them illegal aliens in their own country. As one of America’s keenest students of China, Nicholas Eberstadt, put it in a memo to me, “Peasants who move for work to a big city have no right to services like health care or education; are routinely compensated less for work than ‘natives’ with comparable education and skills; and are virtually certain to lose in any dispute with a local. It’s Soweto with Chinese characteristics.” 
• China is an officially atheistic state, according to the Chinese Communist Party, and religious persecution is a staple of the regime’s repressive apparatus.

Those are the facts. 
To try to square them with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church requires something approaching a psychotic detachment from reality — or, worse, a willful ignorance, turning a blind eye to repression and persecution in order to indulge fantasies of a socialist paradise freed from the unpleasantness of bourgeois liberal society. 
The same detachment from reality also informed Bishop Sánchez’s praise of China’s adherence to the Paris climate accord and its “moral leadership” in the field of climate change. 
What air, one wonders, did the bishop breathe in China, one of the most heavily polluted countries in the world? 
And does His Excellency imagine that a totalitarian regime, bent on asserting itself as a global power and unaccountable to its populace, is going to seriously address its problems of massive air, water, and soil pollution because it signed a piece of paper in the City of Light? 
The “useful idiot” has been a player on the world stage since the days of Lenin (although one wonders whether, in this case, the idiocy is so extreme that the perpetrator’s utility to the regime begins to decline). 
Bishop Sánchez Sorondo’s absurd misrepresentations of the realities of 21st-century China put him in a rogues’ gallery that includes such notables as Walter Duranty, who deliberately failed to report the Ukrainian terror famine in 1932–33 to the readers of the New York Times, and Herbert Matthews, whose encomia to Fidel Castro similarly misled the readers of what was once a national paper of record. 
The further problem in Sánchez’s case is that his statements, however bizarre, inevitably implicate the pope he serves and cast doubt not only on the prudence of the Vatican’s current attempts at a démarche with the PRC (which I addressed here) but on the integrity of the Holy See. 
If a Vatican official, no matter how far down the totem pole, can, with impunity, spout inanities that provide cover for a wicked regime, something is gravely wrong in one of the few centers of power in the world whose primary stock-in-trade is truth-telling. 
According to the Vatican yearbook, the Annuario Pontificio, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo turned 75, the normal retirement age for bishops, last September 8. 
Perhaps his China escapade will suggest to his superiors that it is past time to accept the resignation he submitted then, and thereby deprive him of the megaphone he has used to embarrass the Church, to grossly distort Catholic social doctrine, and to betray the persecuted Catholics of China.

Vatican's crypto-communism

China expert: Vatican official naive for saying China “best implementer” of Church’s social doctrine
By Charles Collins

Vatican's crypto-communists: In this file photo, Francis is flanked by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences.

A leading commentator on the Church in China said a Vatican official’s proclamation that the Communist state “is the best implementer of the Church’s social doctrine” is making “a laughing stock of the Church.”
Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, said in an interview with the Spanish-language edition of Vatican Insider that Beijing “is defending the dignity of the person,” and “that China is evolving very well,” even calling the country “extraordinary.”
“When my friends tell me they are going to China, I always advise them not to stop at the shopping centers, the ultra-luxury hotels and the skyscrapers, but also to go out to the peripheries to get a better picture of real China,” said Father Bernardo Cervellera, editor of AsiaNews, which closely covers the Catholic Church in China.
“Presenting China as the ‘Land of Wonders’ is a bit too far. In his interview following his recent trip to Beijing, Bishop Sanchez Sorondo describes a China that does not exist or that vigilant Chinese escorts did not show him,” Cervellera said in a Feb. 7 editorial published in AsiaNews.
Sánchez Sorondo attended a conference on organ donation last year in Beijing, where he said “China could be a model we need today to respond to globalization, a model for the dignity and freedom of human beings, a model for the eradication of the new kind of slavery-organ trafficking.”
In 2015, the communist country announced it was stopping the practice of using organs from executed prisoners, and the next year announced all donors were volunteers. 

Despite the assurances of the government, human rights activists are skeptical that the use of prisoners for organs has actually ended.
In his interview with Vatican Insider, the bishop said the Chinese government holds “the common good above all else, everything else comes second to the common good.”
“I met an extraordinary China: what people don’t realize is that the central value in China is work, work, work. There’s no other way, fundamentally it is like St Paul said: he who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.”
Sánchez Sorondo also claimed there were not shantytowns in China, nor any drug use by young people.    
However, China National Narcotics Control Commission has recently stated the drug problem in the country is “spreading at a fast pace.” 

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has condemned China’s “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of addicts.
Drug dealers often face capital punishment in a country that leads the world, by far, in executions.
The bishop also made no mention of the stark poverty and lack of basic rights experienced by rural migrants to China’s growing cities, who do not have the basic paperwork required to receive social services outside their home villages.
“Did our bishop try to go to the south of the capital, where for months the city government has been destroying buildings and houses and driving away tens of thousands of migrant workers? Not to mention the suburbs of Shanghai or other Chinese megalopolis, where a “cleansing” is underway and a ban on the “low-end” and defenseless population?” Cervellera asked.
Sánchez Sorondo also used the opportunity of his interview to positively compare the communist regime to the United States under Donald Trump.
“The economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, as the Americans themselves say. How is it possible for oil multinationals to influence Trump? Knowing that all this hurts the earth, as the encyclical [Francis’s Laudato Si’] and scientists say. Liberal thought has dismissed the concept of the common good, it does not even want to take it into account, it states that it is an empty idea, without any benefits. On the contrary, the Chinese, no, they propose work and the common good,” he said.
Cervellera called Sánchez Sorondo “naïve” and said China has the “most destroyed and poisonous environment in the world.”
“What we need to mention, instead, is that in China the economy and politics are the same thing; that the billionaires sit in the Chinese parliament and determine politics according to their interests, which are not those of the rest of the population,” the priest said.
The interview with Sánchez Sorondo comes during a flurry of diplomatic activity between the Vatican and China. 

Numerous reports are claiming an agreement will soon be made on the appointment of bishops in the country, with the government playing a prominent role in the selection of Church leaders.
The government-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association supervises an “open” Catholic Church -- which does not recognize the authority of the pope. 

A parallel “underground” Church exists which recognizes papal authority and faces harassment from government officials.
Cervellera said the pursuit for an agreement with the Chinese government may have influenced the effusive praise heaped on the Communist regime by Sánchez Sorondo.
“We can understand that in the enthusiasm of wanting an agreement between China and the Vatican, Chinese culture, Chinese people and Chinese mentality are exaggerated and exalted,” the priest said.
“But the idolization of China is an ideological affirmation that makes a laughing stock of the Church and harms the world,” he concluded.
Since the election of Francis, Sánchez Sorondo has not been afraid to court controversy, or even appear partisan, in his role at the pontifical academies.
In 2016, he drew criticism for inviting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders to the Vatican in April 2016, during his campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Last year, the bishop said Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement was a “slap in the face” to the Vatican.
In November, he invited several U.S. politicians -- all Democrats -- to a conference on climate change taking place in the Vatican.