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.”

Xi Jinping's Pope

Francis’s Capitulation To Communist China Betrays His People And Faith
Far from making life easier for Chinese Catholics, accepting Communist control of their bishops disheartens and oppresses them further.
By Maureen Mullarkey

Is Francis a naive crypto-communist?

Nothing better reveals the moral compass of the current pontificate than its mania for smiling relations with a Leninist dictatorship. 

Francis is not the first modern pope to wish for better relations with the People’s Republic of China. But he is the first to acquiesce in the regime’s goal of absolute dominion over religions, particularly the Catholic Church. 

His predecessors were more lucid. 

And more principled
The Vatican is poised to surrender control of the long-suffering Roman Catholic Church in mainland China to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CPC). 

Short of full diplomatic recognition, the deal abandons Chinese faithful to their persecutors.
Validly ordained bishops are being asked to step down to make way for government-approved ones, including several who have been excommunicated. (Excommunication is the penalty for accepting ordination without papal approval.) 

Faithful priests already selected as valid successors to retiring bishops have been ordered to forego ordination to avoid offending the Chinese regime.
Far from making life easier for Chinese Catholics, this disheartens and oppresses them further. 

The reward for their heroic decades-long endurance is a garland of tears over betrayal by the papacy they honored at cost to themselves. 

No wonder Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Shanghai-born bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, calls it “a bad deal.” 

A lion of a man, and a persistent advocate for human rights and democratic liberties, Zen has been an obstacle to Vatican appeasement of Beijing.

What China’s Rulers Want, and Are Getting
On January 18, the cardinal posted an open letter on his blog—reposted by AsiaNews—warning against the consequence of accommodation: “The Communist government is making new, harsher regulations limiting religious freedom. They are now strictly enforcing regulations which, up to now, were practically only on paper. From the 1st of February, 2018, attendance to Mass in the underground will no longer be tolerated.”
Mass in the underground will no longer be tolerated. 

In other words, the emboldened regime need no longer keep up appearances for public relations. 

With the Vatican’s blessing, it can openly enforce prohibition of the valid Mass for which close to three generations of Chinese faithful have suffered.
Going forward, all bishops will be “democratically” selected by the government-led Council of Bishops, to which the Vatican has already ceded authority. 

Names will be sent to Rome for rubber stamping, a sellout that appears to have been in the works for some time.
In a significant but overlooked 2015 article in AsiaNews, editor Bernardo Cervellera explained Beijing’s bedrock position in “negotiations” with Vatican sympathizers. 

Then as now, any mention of imprisoned bishops was off the table. 

Then as now, Beijing’s proposal consisted exclusively on complete recognition by the Holy See for all Communist Party-approved bishops. 

Moreover: “The Holy See must approve the Council’s appointment and has a weak veto only in ‘severe’ cases, which must be justified if used. If the Holy See’s justifications are considered ‘insufficient,’ the Council of Bishops may decide to proceed anyway.”
Cervella continued: “The increased controls have only one purpose: to preserve the monopoly of power of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and remove or crush any person who might challenge it or its very existence.”
The Vatican has already quietly accepted certain Communist-appointed bishops. 

But even circumspection no longer applies. 

On January 29, AsiaNews quoted Zen again: “ Do I think that 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.”

‘Manipulate Catholics to Submit to the Communist Party’
Francis’ bow to Beijing is not an internal matter for Catholics only. 

The concession is a rag bag of geopolitical ramifications, an ominous move in a larger global power struggle in which the Chinese Catholics are so much collateral damage. 

The omelet matters more than broken eggs.
Judged solely by low Machiavellian standards of statesmanship, the capitulation is a political coup. But for whom? 

For China, thawed relations with the Vatican enhance its global image and deflect attention from its militarism, duplicity, and depravity regarding human rights. 

Plus, the regime earns a diplomatic victory over Taiwan. 

The Vatican can tout the close of a seven-decade breach between the underground “Church of the Catacombs,” loyal to the Holy See, and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a creature of Beijing.
The Patriotic Association, founded in 1957 as the CPC’s counter-church, is a nationalist stand-in for the ancient repository of thought and worship in communion with Rome. 

Twenty years ago, Matthias Lu, a noted translator of the church fathers, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas into Chinese, summarized its aims. 

They have not changed: “Its [the Association’s] commitment is to manipulate the mass of the Catholic population in order to integrate them into the Socialist revolutionary movement by submitting them to the leadership of the Communist Party in all things.”
Vatican press trumpets this pact with the devil as an historic halt to impending schism. 

The spin is worthy of the CPC’s Central Publicity Department. 

Francis has merely flattered the regime by normalizing an existing schism dating from the 1950s when the Catholic Church was outlawed, its properties confiscated (later transferred to the Patriotic Association), and Catholics arrested en masse. 

The winning side in this new order belongs to Xi Jinping.

Communism Is Not Reconcilable with Christianity
In May, 2015, Xi Jinping spoke with the United Front, led by the Central Committee. 

He repeated what Communist Party leasers have affirmed since Mao denounced the Vatican as “the stray dog of capitalism.” 

In sum, he insisted on “Sinicization of religion,” including independence from “foreign influences,” as the only way the Catholic Church will be permitted to survive in China.
Xi’s Sinification is not the dialogue with Chinese culture (inculturation) that has characterized the church in China since the sixteenth century. 

Instead, it is a political power grab that reduces Christianity to an offshoot of socialist doctrine. Churches can continue to function as charitable organizations or non-governmental organizations, but the hierarchy become bureaucrats in the party apparatus.
Autonomy from Rome teems with implication for the Catholic Church’s social doctrines. 

The bureaucrats of collectivism have their own dogmas, infallibilities, and absolutes. 

These are in radical contradiction to traditional Christian reflection on morality, especially those relating to life issues.
Implicit in Francis’ conciliation is permission to ignore a range of moral matters that define a Christian conscience. 

The Catholic Church’s philosophical arguments defending the inviolable dignity of human life and the primacy of the individual cannot be asserted in pulpits. 

Silence is assured on labor camps, on the execution of prisoners to feed the lucrative organ trade, and on “family planning” policies. 

A comfortably Sinicized church can keep a good conscience while disregarding forced abortions, forced sterilizations, or forced migration (e.g., the massive Three Gorges Dam project unhoused 1.4 million peasants and submerged some 900 towns and villages).
In all, the Bergolian pontificate is set to achieve what the Communists have not: strangulating the Catholic Church as a living witness to the gospels and their demands.

Xi Jinping's Pope

Cardinal Joseph Zen hits back at Vatican over deal with China
By Gerry Shih 

In this Dec. 24, 2015 file photo, an overflow crowd prays outside of the Southern Cathedral, an officially-sanctioned Catholic church in Beijing, during a Christmas Eve mass. The retired archbishop of Hong Kong has slammed the Holy See’s negotiations with the Chinese government as a “catastrophe” that would bring suffering to millions of worshippers, as he escalates an extraordinary war of words against his church. 

BEIJING — The retired archbishop of Hong Kong has slammed the Holy See’s negotiations with Beijing as a “catastrophe” that would bring suffering to millions of worshippers, as a bitter dispute inside the Roman Catholic Church over its future in China escalates in a dramatic fashion.
Cardinal Joseph Zen warned in a blog post this week that Chinese Catholics who follow so-called underground churches are at risk of arrest even while the Catholic Church pushes for a historic breakthrough in relations with China’s ruling Communist Party.
Zen, a leading critic of the Vatican’s outreach to China, revealed in a statement last month that the Vatican had asked a legitimate “underground” bishop to stand down in favor of an excommunicated one favored by Beijing — a reshuffle that he suggested was orchestrated by church officials without the pope’s full knowledge.
Zen, 86, doubled down on Monday and denounced church officials for betraying Chinese worshippers in what amounted to a highly unusual attack from a clergyman against the Holy See.
“Mainland brothers and sisters fear not losing all they have, the prison cell or shedding their blood,” Zen wrote. 

“Their greatest suffering is being sold out by their ‘loved ones.’”

In an extraordinary escalation, Zen also criticized Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, the official charged with negotiations with Beijing, as a “man of little faith” who did not understand the “true suffering” of persecuted Chinese Catholics.
The proposed changing of the bishops was the clearest evidence yet of the Vatican’s effort to reach a deal with China, a country with an estimated 12 million Catholics. 

Of those, about half worship in “underground” churches that recognize only Rome as their highest authority while the rest belong to state-authorized churches with clergy named by Beijing.
The Vatican, particularly under Francis, has been keen to reach a deal with the Chinese government.

A sticking point in secret negotiations over at least the past year has concerned whether Rome or Beijing has final say over bishop appointments. 

China’s Foreign Ministry has said the government supports dialogue and advancing ties with the Vatican on the basis of “relevant principles” — a reference to Beijing holding final say over appointments.
Zen said the Vatican had “given in” to the Communist Party by seeking to replace Shantou Bishop Peter Zhuang Jianjian with Bishop Joseph Huang Bingzhang, who is backed by the state. 

Last month, he disclosed the behind-the-scenes discussions to replace bishops and said he had been so upset that he traveled to Rome to raise objections with Francis.
“Priests and congregants will have many long nights of suffering over the prospect of obeying and respecting those priests who were illegitimate today but will be legitimized by the Holy See tomorrow, having been approved by the government,” Zen wrote.
A pro-democracy advocate and longtime critic of the Chinese government, Zen appeared to suggest that China would crack down more on unauthorized congregations after reaching agreements with the Vatican over authorized congregations. 

He wrote that the government will “strictly enforce regulations on religion” beginning this month and that priests in Shanghai have warned their congregations “not to attend Mass on pain of arrest.”
An official from the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, a government body supervising state-authorized Catholic congregations, said he could not respond to Zen’s claim that Shanghai priests have warned their followers against attending Mass.
The Vatican had no immediate comment on Zen’s latest blog post. 

But it said last week it was “surprising and regrettable” that some members of the church were fostering “confusion and controversy.”
In an editorial Tuesday, China’s state-run Global Times newspaper said Beijing and the Vatican would establish diplomatic relations “sooner or later” and that a deal would be “tremendously beneficial to Catholics.” 

Without directly naming Zen, the paper also rebuked “a few radical religious groups who have no right to intervene in bishop appointments.”
“Francis has a positive image with the Chinese public,” the editorial concluded. 

“It is expected he will push China-Vatican ties forward and solve related problems with his wisdom.”