'The many problems with the Vatican’s China deal', Benedict Rogers

If the Holy See won’t speak out, then ordinary Catholics — parish priests, religious, and laity — should do so

The Vatican announced on Oct. 22 that it has yet again renewed its agreement with China on the appointment of Catholic bishops, for an additional four years. This is the third time the deal has been renewed after it was first signed in 2018 — without any review, scrutiny, transparency, or conditionality.

The announcement came just days after the publication of a report by the Hudson Institute, detailing the cases of ten persecuted Catholic bishops in China.

It came as a group of 15 democracies, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Japan highlighted the human rights crisis in China at the United Nations, and called for the release of all arbitrarily detained Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans and to allow independent human rights observers “unfettered and meaningful access” to Xinjiang and Tibet.

It came as Vladimir Putin welcomed Xi Jinping to a summit of BRICS countries in Moscow and as reports emerged of North Korean troops being sent to support Putin’s war in Ukraine. Hardly an opportune time for the Church to be doing deals with the devil in Beijing.

There are many problems with the Vatican’s China deal, but four principal ones.

First, the text remains secret. It has been renewed three times — in 2020 and 2022 for two-year periods, and now for four years — yet we still do not know the details of the agreement. If it is such a good deal that it is worth renewing, isn’t it also worth making public? What does either party to the agreement have to hide?

Second, the little we do know about it is that it gives an avowedly atheistic and repressive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime a key role in the appointment of Catholic bishops. This has led, heartbreakingly, to the Vatican requesting several underground Catholic bishops in China who have been courageously loyal to Rome — at great sacrifice, including years in jail — to stand down in favor of Beijing’s nominees.

It is a betrayal of loyal Catholics who have risked their lives for decades to remain faithful. While the Vatican’s intention was to unify the Church in China, bringing together the underground and state-approved congregations, it has had the opposite effect.

Third, it has bought the pope’s silence on human rights in China. Pope Francis is a pontiff who is not shy of speaking out about injustice — almost every Sunday when he prays the Angelus from his window above St. Peter’s Square in Rome.

He rightly speaks out about one issue of injustice or another in the world today. But the one part of the world where he has been conspicuous by his silence is China. Not a word about the persecution of Christians in China, not a word about the atrocities in Tibet, not a word about the crackdown in Hong Kong, not a word about the threats to Taiwan — despite the Holy See being one of the few states to hold diplomatic relations with the island — and barely a murmur about the Uyghur genocide.

The pope has said nothing about the imprisonment of devout Catholic entrepreneur and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, despite reports that Lai has been denied Holy Communion since last December, and the Vatican has said little about the harassment of Hong Kong’s Bishop Emeritus 92-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen.

Fourth, China can never be trusted to keep its word. No agreement with Beijing’s brutal regime is worth the paper it is written on. We have seen that most blatantly with the broken promises over Hong Kong, as Xi has ripped up the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a treaty registered at the United Nations and valid until 2047.

We have already seen it in the past six years with the Sino-Vatican deal, which Beijing has broken repeatedly. So why continue to renew it?

The Vatican’s motivations behind the agreement are undoubtedly well-intentioned. One has to assume that Francis hopes the deal, in the long term, will enhance protection for the Church and expand religious freedom.

As a Jesuit, inspired by the example of Matteo Ricci, the 16th-century missionary who gained influence in the Chinese imperial court and helped introduce Christianity to China, Francis has romantic — if naïve — hopes of achieving the same influence. But six years on from the signing of the deal, the evidence points in the opposite direction.

The Hudson Institute’s report, written by long-time China religious freedom expert Nina Shea, claims that religious persecution of the Catholic Church in China has “intensified” since the China-Vatican deal was first agreed in 2018. It details the ongoing cases of 10 Vatican-approved Catholic bishops in China whose persecution “has continued or worsened” since the deal.

This is the first public report to collect documentation on the current persecution of the Church’s top leaders, but as its authors admit, it is not comprehensive — other Chinese bishops who have been persecuted in the past six years have been excluded either because they have died or there is little known about their current plight.

Furthermore, the report only profiles ten bishops — it does not touch on the many persecuted Catholic priests, religious, and laity.

The 10 bishops have been subjected, as the Hudson Institute details, to “indefinite detention without due process, disappearances, open-ended security police investigations, banishments from their dioceses, or other impediments to their episcopal ministries, including threats, surveillance, interrogation, and so-called re-education.”

Seven have been detained without due process, with several having been under continuous detention for years or even decades, while others have been repeatedly detained, up to six times since the Sino-Vatican agreement was signed.

These bishops include Bishop James Su Zhimin, who has been in continuous secret detention for 27 years; Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin, who was taken into secret custody on Jan. 2 this year; Bishop Augustine Cui Tai, who has been taken into custody at least four times since the Vatican’s deal with China was signed and remains in “secret indefinite detention without due process”; Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo, who has been detained since 2020 having spent much of the past three decades in detention; Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu, who was arrested in May 2021 while convalescing from cancer surgery and has been detained ever since; Shanghai’s Bishop Joseph Xing Wenzhi, who has been missing since 2011; Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin, who has been detained since 2012; Bishop Melchior Shi Hongzhen who has been detained for the past 15 years; and Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin, whose current whereabouts and well-being are unknown.

The tenth bishop profiled in the report is Hong Kong’s courageous Cardinal Zen, who is not detained but has been effectively silenced, with the threat of jail hanging over him, having been arrested and put on trial in 2022.

The fact that the Vatican failed to make the release of all jailed Catholic bishops and priests a precondition for the renewal of the agreement beggars belief. The fact that the Vatican is silent about the plight of its jailed bishops is heart-rending. And the fact that the Vatican renewed its deal — which has delivered no benefits and only facilitated more repression — without any apparent review is an outrage.

Diplomacy has its place. Negotiations are necessary. Reconciliation is laudable and should always be an objective for the Church. Naivety is forgivable. But complicity and appeasement — to which the Vatican’s approach is moving perilously close — have no place in Catholic social teaching.

Those responsible for this deal with China ought to refresh their knowledge of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and in particular Dignitatis Humanae (Dignity of the Human Person), and remember that a state’s attempt to control people’s consciences and faith and appoint their bishops is what has cost so many Catholics through the ages, such as Thomas More, Edmund Campion and others, their lives. They ought also to look to the example of Pope St John Paul II, whose Feast Day we just celebrated, and remember how he stood up for religious freedom, human rights and dignity against communist tyranny — and won.

The Hudson Institute’s report must be studied widely, in the Vatican and in parishes and dioceses around the world. If the Vatican won’t speak out, then ordinary Catholics — parish priests, religious and laity — should do so, and at the very least pray for these ten bishops and for all persecuted Catholics in China. And we should pray for a re-think in Rome about China policy.

This article was published in UCA News on 24 October 2024.