Pius XII bis or Xi Jinping's Pope?

• Francis's deal with China betrays Christ, says Hong Kong cardinal
• Senior Catholic Joseph Zen says the pontiff ‘may not know the Communist persecutors who have killed hundreds of thousands’

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong and Tom Phillips in Beijing

Cardinal Joseph Zen, a former bishop of Hong Kong, says supporters of the Vatican deal do not truly know China.

The most senior Chinese Catholic has slammed a rapprochement between the Vatican and Beijing, saying it would be “betraying Jesus Christ”, amid a thaw in more than six decades of bitter relations.
Talk of a deal between the two sides has been building for months, with some saying the diplomatic coup for Francis would be resolving the highly controversial issue of allowing China’s Communist government to have a hand in selecting bishops.
But Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 84-year-old former bishop of Hong Kong, has been an outspoken critic, saying any agreement where Beijing would have a hand in approving clergy would be “a surrender”.

“The pope is a little naive, he doesn’t have the background to know the Communists in China,” Zen said at the Salesian school in Hong Kong where he still teaches. 

“The pope used to know the persecuted Communists in Latin America, but he may not know the Communist persecutors who have killed hundreds of thousands.”
Chinese Catholics are free to go to mass and attend government-sanctioned churches, but barred from proselytising. 

The state-controlled China Catholic Patriotic Association controls the church and appoints bishops, currently without any input from the Vatican.
An “underground” Catholic church exists, with some estimates saying it is larger than the official one, and its members and clergy have faced persecution by authorities.
Protestant Christians also face similar challenges, and a recent campaign by authorities in eastern China has seen more than 1,200 crosses removed from buildings and churches demolished.
Zen complained that most supporters of the deal did not truly know China, lacking first-hand experience with the state of the church under the Communists. 

He spent seven years frequently teaching in cities across China in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that was followed by severe tightening of freedom of expression and religion.
One motivation for the Vatican is the relatively small number of Catholics in a country filled with people who are increasingly searching for meaning in their lives. 

There are roughly 10 million Catholics, just a 10th of the overall number of Christians in the country.
With “fake freedom” under a proposed deal, priests could more easily preach and more churches would open, Zen predicted, but “it’s only the impression of freedom, it’s not real freedom, the people sooner or later will see the bishops are puppets of the government and not really the shepherds of the flock.”

“The official bishops are not really preaching the gospel,” Zen added.

“They are preaching obedience to Communist authority.”
Francesco Sisci, an Italian scholar and journalist who is based in Beijing, said “a very wide-ranging agreement” appeared to be on the horizon but that it remained unclear exactly when the deal would be unveiled. 

No observers expected it to lead to full diplomatic relations.

“The church doesn’t want crusades … and doesn’t want to start a new one with China,” he said.

“The pope may be naive but it is his job being naive, being a man of faith,” Sisci added.
But that naivety could harm the Catholic church in China for decades to come, according to Zen, and the pope is pushing a pact he may not fully understand.
“You cannot go into negotiations with the mentality ‘we want to sign an agreement at any cost’, then you are surrendering yourself, you are betraying yourself, you are betraying Jesus Christ,” Zen lamented.
“If you cannot get a good deal, an acceptable deal, then the Vatican should walk away and maybe try again later,” he added. 

“Could the church negotiate with Hitler? Could it negotiate with Stalin? No.”
Ordinary Catholics who attend the government-controlled church welcome the negotiations as any deal would legitimise what is essentially a schismatic church.

“If they could really strike a deal, not only would us Catholics be happy, but all of the Chinese people should rejoice,” said Zhao, 36, who has been a Catholic for 20 years and works at the oldest Catholic church in China, close to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 

He declined to give his full name because of the sensitivity of discussing religion.
But Zen warned that gains, diplomatically and in the number of faithful, could be short-lived.
In the long run people would leave the church as they became disillusioned with the “fake” institution, Zen said, adding “the clergy need to side with the people, the poor and the persecuted, not to government”.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of new Christians,” Zen said. 

“If that blood is poisoned, how long will those new Christians last?”

XI JINPING'S POPE

THE SECRET HISTORY OF FRANCIS

JOHN GORNVELL

Pius XII bis

An Open Letter To Francis On China

Benedict Rogers

Dear Holy Father,

Like every true Catholic in the world, I love you and respect your authority as the Successor of St Peter.
Like a great many people in the world, well beyond the Catholic Church, I recognise the beautiful message you, as Pope Francis, bring to the world.
And as a new Catholic who came into the Church little over ten days after your election to the papacy, my Catholic faith is inspired and intertwined with your pontificate.
I became a Catholic on Palm Sunday, 2013, received into the Church by Burma’s first-ever Cardinal Charles Maung Bo. 

Although I am British, I became a Catholic in an Asian country emerging from dictatorship, inspired by a Church that has endured decades of persecution. 

I have also lived in China and Hong Kong, and have come to know and love Cardinal Joseph Zen, whose story is told, along with my other heroes, in my book From Burma to Rome, which I had the privilege of presenting to you when we met in August.
For all these reasons -- because I love you, Holy Father, because I love the Church, because I love the people of China and Asia, because I love Cardinal Zen, and most of all because I love God and our Lord Jesus Christ -- I humbly appeal to you to reconsider your proposed agreement with the Communist regime in China:before it is too late.
Over the past three years, the human rights situation in China has deteriorated dramatically. 

Hundreds of human rights lawyers, many of them Christians, have been detained, simply for defending freedom of religion and freedom of conscience cases. 

Thousands of Christian crosses have been destroyed. Many Christian clergy, Catholic and Protestant, remain in jail or harassed. 

Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners continue to be persecuted. Allegations of forced organ harvesting -- targeting prisoners of conscience -- persist. 

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo remains in jail. 

Hong Kong’s freedoms are now in at tatters.
Earlier this year, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission in the United Kingdom published an in-depth report, The Darkest Moment: The Crackdown on Human Rights in China 2013-2016. 

It was launched by the former Governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten, himself a Catholic, in June, and includes testimonies from Hong Kong democrats Martin Lee and Anson Chan, both Catholics.
Holy Father, you will be well aware of the arguments made by Cardinal Zen, which I need not repeat. I simply say that at this time, human rights are deteriorating drastically in China and I don’t believe it is the time to compromise. 

At a time when religious freedom overall in China is being further restricted, when other religions are being severely persecuted, when organs may be being harvested, when lawyers are being harassed, when freedom of expression is being denied, now is not the time to seek a special arrangement for the Catholic Church. 

Now is not the time to kowtow.
Furthermore, while I am a very new Catholic, and so I write with all appropriate humility, two of the things that attracted me into the Church are the Church’s commitment to justice and human rights, as set out in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, and the Apostolic Succession. 

That means the Church must take a stand against Xi Jinping’s brutality as it did against Caesar’s, Stalin’s and Hitler’s. 

And it means that it cannot settle for anything less than complete Papal authority over episcopal and priestly appointments in China. 

I don’t know what deal might be about to be agreed, but I find it hard to imagine Beijing agreeing to this. 

If it does, then I welcome it. 

But if not, I urge you to reject the deal. 

How can bishops appointed by a communist, corrupt, cruel and brutal regime be acceptable to the Church founded by Jesus Christ?
Instead of compromise with Beijing, I urge you -- Holy Father -- to follow in the footsteps of the Apostles, and lead a revolution for peaceful change in China.
With humble, sincere prayers from a relatively new Catholic,

Benedict Rogers