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The Vatican–China Pact Has Proved to Be a Catastrophe
The precise wording of the Vatican–China Provisional Agreement, signed on Sept. 22, 2018, remains a closely guarded secret, but its dire effects are plain for all to see. By affording legitimacy to the Chinese Communist Party–dominated Patriotic Catholic Church — theretofore deemed schismatic due its appointments of regime-friendly bishops without papal approval — the Holy See evidently hoped to gain more of a say in the inner workings of its illegitimate Chinese offshoot, while bringing the Chinese Underground Catholic Church out of the shadows. Meant to resolve a 21-century investiture controversy, the Vatican–China pact proved to be nothing short of a catastrophe. Whereas the Road to Canossa ended in the bitterly cold winter of 1077, with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV gaunt from fasting, clad in a penitential hairshirt, and kneeling barefoot in the snow before a triumphant Pope Gregory VII, here Pope Francis found himself, in less dramatic but equally consequential fashion, submitting to China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping, and in a manner that led Hong Kong’s emeritus bishop Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun, to conclude sadly that “the Vatican lost everything, [and] got nothing.”
A brief nota informativa, issued by the Vatican press office the day the agreement took effect, gives us some sense of the Vatican’s motivations:
With a view to sustaining the proclamation of the Gospel in China, the Holy Father Pope Francis has decided to readmit to full ecclesial communion the remaining ‘official’ Bishops, ordained without Pontifical Mandate and previously subjected to excommunication latae sententiae…Pope Francis hopes that, with these decisions, a new process may begin that will allow the wounds of the past to be overcome, leading to the full communion of all Chinese Catholics. The Catholic Community in China is called to live a more fraternal collaboration, in order to promote with renewed commitment the proclamation of the Gospel.
Pursuant to the provisional agreement, the Vatican issued its “Pastoral guidelines of the Holy See concerning the civil registration of clergy in China” on June 28, 2019, further legitimating the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church by allowing bishops and priests to join the ersatz Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, while impotently calling for “respect” for those Chinese Catholics who still refuse to affiliate themselves with the CCP-dominated church, a respect, incidentally, that the genocidal communist regime has never shown underground Christians in the past, and is exceedingly unlikely to in the future.
The “wounds of the past” mentioned in the Vatican’s nota informativa are very real, and many members of the Underground Catholic Church in China have proven understandably reluctant to recognize the authority of the counterfeit Patriotic Catholic Church, while Catholic authority figures tend to tread lightly around the issue. In his preface to The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs, the aforementioned Cardinal Joseph Zen found it “necessary to admit that there was also a kind of reluctance, even on the part of the members of the Church, in pointedly denouncing the persecutions sustained under the Mao regime.” But “to continue on this path of silence today,” Zen continued, “would be unpardonable and indefensible,” for “we have a duty to remember, and in particular to remember the martyrs of the twentieth century, all the martyrs, under any regime, and to speak out.” The Vatican has clearly adopted a different approach, engaging in “fraternal collaboration” with a fanatically atheistic, power-hungry regime that holds religion in absolute contempt, and fanatically perpetuates Mao’s legacy by persecuting individuals and communities of all faiths, Christianity included.
Churning out propaganda for the regime is one of the primary functions of the Patriotic Catholic Church.
That the Vatican–China Provisional Agreement was a veritable deal with the devil should never have been in doubt. We know that a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit, so it has been unsurprising to find leaders of the Patriotic Catholic Church, like Bishop Michael Fu Tieshan, debasing themselves in recent decades on behalf of the CCP by, for example, cheering on the persecution of the Falun Gong religious movement by labeling it as one of the “ugly” “cults” that “pose a threat to society.” Today, prominent members of the Patriotic Catholic Church, like the formerly excommunicated Vincent Zhan Silu, bishop of the archdiocese of Funing, are sinking even lower. Bishop Zhan Silu, for instance, recently participated in a “patriotic education tour,” leading priests and friars on a visit to East Turkestan (Xinjiang), where he exhorted the victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign of religious repression and cultural genocide to “be politically dependable, and study and preach Xi Jinping’s thought diligently.” Zhan Silu, who languished under papal excommunication for some 18 years, must hardly be able to believe his extraordinary luck. He can now hold himself out as the officially recognized bishop of Funing, while simultaneously serving his real masters by acting as an overt communist propaganda agent. Before 2018, there was at least some pretense that someone of his ilk was not fit to serve in such an august role.
As its name suggests, churning out propaganda for the regime is one of the primary functions of the Patriotic Catholic Church, all the more so in the aftermath of recent legislative developments embodied in China’s revised Religious Affairs Regulations (2017), the Measures for the Administration of Religious Groups (2020), and the new Patriotic Education Law (2023). “Patriotic education,” which is predicated on “Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” would seem fundamentally incompatible with Catholic doctrine, but the Patriotic Catholic Church has enthusiastically embraced it all the same. It has to. Zhang Chunhua, writing for Bitter Winter, has described visits during the summer of 2024 by Catholic clergy and lay leaders from Guangdong province to various revolutionary education sites, like the Enyangtai Independent Battalion Activity Site, which commemorates the achievements of a particularly brutal Maoist detachment and has become a prominent communist pilgrimage spot. Li Changming, chairman of the Yangjiang City Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, has insisted that Catholic believers must “learn to continue the red bloodline, inherit the red genes, and forge ahead,” prompting the dissident Zhang Chunhua to muse:
What Catholicism has to do with the “red genes” and “red bloodlines” of violent Communist agitators (who killed among others quite a few Catholic priests) remains unclear. Or perhaps it is very clear. The Patriotic Catholic Church, which after the Vatican China deal of 2018 operates with the blessing of the Vatican, continues its main business, i.e., transforming Catholic priests and lay leaders into loyal Communists of the “red bloodline.”
Reveling in genocide, passing on red genes, forging ahead toward the goals of an inhuman regime, and all with the official imprimatur of the Vatican itself — such is the maddening legacy of the Vatican–China Provisional Agreement.
The Patriotic Catholic Church is by no means the only religious body that has been subsumed into the all-encompassing Chinese communist state. The authorized Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, and Protestant (Three Self Church) religious associations have all similarly submitted to the Zhongnanhai, allowing it to pick their leaders, guide their doctrines, “sinicize” them, and force them to promote “core socialist values and promote the construction of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics.” All this time and energy spent on religious affairs may seem strange coming from a regime run by self-styled “steadfast Marxist atheists” whose only faith is in the disastrous and sadistic tenets of Marxism–Leninism — and the Party does view its Marxism in straightforwardly theological terms, as a genuine “faith” (信仰, or xinyang). How very absurd and unseemly it is, then, for the Chinese government to be organizing forums on the “sinicization” of Taoism, only the most quintessentially Chinese religion there is, or issuing Kafka-esque bureaucratic guidance on the proper procedures for the reincarnation of Tibetan Living Buddhas, with Master Chang Zang of the China Buddhist Association informing his surely baffled co-religionists that “government approval” is an important principle “that must be adhered to in the reincarnation of living Buddhas,” something which will “play a positive role in managing the affairs of the reincarnation of living Buddhas in accordance with the law, promoting the healthy inheritance of Tibetan Buddhism, and actively guiding Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to socialist society.” There is, however, a definite method to this apparent madness.
Total control of official religious institutions by the Zhongnanhai provides the opportunity for humiliation rituals and propaganda coups, like the Vatican’s 2018 capitulation, and convenient new avenues for political indoctrination, like the “patriotic education” furnished by apparatchiks like Vincent Zhan Silu and Li Changming. The wholesale massacres of Christians in Mao’s day were counterproductive, blackening the country’s reputation abroad and producing too many martyrs. Nowadays, the regime opts for a relatively toned down approach. China’s leaders advocate something known as rùn wù wúshēng (润物无声), or “silent saturation,” a phrase coined by the Tang-era poet Tu Fu in reference to the rejuvenating qualities of spring rain, but now, as Alex Colville of the China Media Project has summarized it, utilized in terms of “the need for more subtle and effective means to disseminate and inculcate the party’s thoughts and agendas.” And we can see in real time that there is no better way to eliminate official religion in China than to co-opt religious institutions and gradually turn them into little more than propaganda organs.
A Chinese Christian who belongs to one of these officially tolerated but regime-administered religious institutions, part of what the sociologist Fenggang Yang called the religious Red Market (as opposed to the flourishing underground religious Black Market), will eventually realize that he or she belongs to an organized religion that is, absurdly enough, organized and run by a Party that itself has “zero tolerance” for religious sympathy in its own ranks. A three-fold choice presents itself: remain in an ersatz church that is viewed by its own leaders as having an expiration date, try to secure Party preferment by abandoning one’s faith, or take the dangerous but spiritually fulfilling plunge into the Black Market of underground Christian communities. Wang Yi, a jurist-turned-pastor who founded the Early Rain Covenant house church, argued in his 2010 Our House Church Manifesto [我们的家庭教会立场] that “[O]nce the church falls into the trap of being ruled by emotions, depending on power, or yielding to politics on matters of doctrine, priesthood, or sacraments, they have worshiped a false god. They will have lost the most beautiful quality of Christ’s bride, purity, so that they cease to be the Lord’s church.” It is in the Black Market that many Christians can still find that sense of purity, untainted by the grubby, blood-stained fingers of the Communist regime.
The life of the underground Chinese Christian is fraught with peril. Menaced by the government, and all too often ignored by the wider world, members of underground churches and house churches risk imprisonment each and every day. As Pastor Wang Yi so eloquently wrote in an October 2017 pastoral letter, “[T]he world does not recognize you, but your value is, ironically, manifested through their ignorance and lack of recognition. Put another way, you are a group of master ballet dancers performing at a landfill. And this is the meaning of the landfill — that although you will be deemed lunatics by those who stay near it, because of you, the landfill has become an image of the new heaven and the new earth.” All people of faith, all people who value culture and tradition, are in some ways like dancers on the precipice of the vast, churned-up, stinking landfill of modernity, but in China the stakes are so much higher. “However,” concluded Wang Yi, “this is part of the meaning of the landfill, for God has allowed them to be ambitious because he wants to magnify the value of faith. In general, the more terrible the performance environment, the greater the ‘eschatological meaning’ of the church’s show.” Whether one chooses to join the landfill, or dance on its edges, tells you everything.
On Dec. 9, 2018, just a few months after the landmark Vatican–China pact, Wang Yi and more than a hundred members of the Early Rain Covenant Church were arrested in Chengdu. A little more than a year later, Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and conducting “illegal business operations.” Another Chinese Christian prisoner of conscience, Zhu Chunlin, recounted for Weiquanwang (the Chinese Rights Protection Network) the conditions of “strict control and punishment” — psychological abuse and physical torture, often involving heavy iron shackles — to which he and his co-religionists are regularly subjected:
It was the darkest moment in my life. I could only endure it silently and pray to my Lord for mercy! After a while, I could no longer endure it and it was difficult for me to persist. The Spring Festival was approaching, and I followed their advice and wrote a self-criticism. I read it out publicly in the prison area during dinner on February 2, 2019. I was forced to admit that I had been wrong to disobey their punishment measures, and promised to obey them in the future. Later, on the next day, February 3, 2019, they removed the torture instruments from me, ending a painful experience of twenty days. Afterwards, my feet still hurt for a long time. The humiliation, physical, and mental damage caused by the incident will be unforgettable for all my life, an unforgettable memory that will accompany me for the rest of my life.
[那是我人生中的一段至暗时刻，我只能默默忍受，向我的主祷告祈求，求神怜悯！后来我实在无法忍耐，难以坚持，新年的春节也已临近，我只好按照他们的意见，写了一份检讨书，于2019年2月2日晚餐时在全监区当众宣读，被迫承认我不服从他们的处罚措施是错误的，保证以后一定要服从，后来才于次日2019年2月3日给我卸除了刑具，结束了我历时20天的痛苦经历，事后我的双脚依然疼痛了好长一段时间。事情给我造成的屈辱和身心伤害让我今生难忘，刻骨铭心的记忆将在我的余生与我常年陪伴。]
Such is the treatment Pastor Wang and other members of house churches, who reject the “soundless saturation” of communism, can expect at the hands of the Chinese government.
On Feb. 14, 2020, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, met with Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference. It was not, of course, the pastor and political prisoner Wang Yi with whom Archbishop Gallagher met, for he was (and is) still languishing in a Chinese dungeon. No, the Wang Yi with whom the Vatican’s top diplomat met amidst great fanfare was China’s foreign minister of the same name. Benedict Rogers, a human rights activist and founder of Hong Kong Watch, wondered whether:
this bitter irony escape[d] Archbishop Gallagher? Did he raise Pastor Wang’s case — or that of any of those imprisoned and suffering in Chinese prisons or re-education camps for their religious faith? Did he demand the release of Catholics and others who are in jail? Did he address the incarceration of at least one million, perhaps as many as three million, predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in prison camps, which expert Adrian Zenz has described as “the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust”?
The silence from the Vatican on the subject of Pastor Wang Yi and his fellow prisoners is deafening. The complicity of the Patriotic Catholic Church in the crimes of the CCP is an even greater moral outrage. The spectacle of Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu in Xinjiang, urging Uyghurs to “be politically dependable, and study and preach Xi Jinping’s thought diligently,” and of Li Changming in Guangdong, exhorting Chinese Catholics to “continue the red bloodline, inherit the red genes, and forge ahead,” is genuinely sickening.
Abdurehim Otkur, a Uyghur poet, once assumed the voice of the heavenly mountains of Khan Tengri:
I rocked the cradle of civilization since time began
I have been here, from all-knowing earth’s prime
Moment and so my head is as white as my coat,
but a white
Flag I will never become, no matter what you do
…
My head doesn’t bend; I do not sway
How, then, did I become a white flag to you?
My heart is red fire, and I lift a blue flag with dignity;
I march boldly in ancientness, singing
My song of victory that echoes the world
You, have you forgotten the centuries,
The years of my sustenance, collecting
My treasures, that you in shameless ingratitude
See me as a white flag?
For Otkur, the snow-capped mountains of Khan Tengri, those enduring symbols of Uyghur identity, were not be taken for a white flag, even though they had fallen under the sway of the conquering Chinese. So too must the garments of salvation, the robe of his righteousness not be waved like a white flag by those content to wallow in the reeking politico-moral landfill of communist China. Pastor Wang Yi, in his “Declaration of Faithful Disobedience,” proclaimed that “all acts of the church are attempts to prove to the world the real existence of another world,” a world from which the CCP recoils in vampiric fashion, while “the communist regime is filled with fear at a church that is no longer afraid of it.” That same regime, it therefore stands to reason, will gladly collaborate with a church that remains in the grip of fear, oblivious to the lessons of its centuries of sustenance.
READ MORE by Matthew Omolesky:
The Stable Path: Two Years of Ukraine’s Fight for Survival
Snow Country in Japan
The post The Vatican–China Pact Has Proved to Be a Catastrophe appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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