Pope Francis is playacting Realpolitik
The Vatican’s diplomacy with China and other authoritarian governments,
is based on a century-old fantasy of its worldly power
BY GEORGE WEIGEL
February 15, 2018
In recent weeks, many observers have been puzzled, and some deeply disturbed, by what appears to be an impending deal between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China.
The agreement would concede a significant role to the Chinese Communist regime in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in China, as a step on the path to full diplomatic relations between Beijing and the Holy See. More than a few questions have been raised about such an arrangement.
['A significant role' is a delusion of Bergoglio and his diplomats - synonymous to Cardinal Parolin's saying 'The Vatican will have a say' in the appointment of Chinese bishops. As I've said before, yeah, right! – that 'say' is going to consist entirely of saying YES to any bishops nominated by the Communist regime, which will probably never even bother to ask the Vatican if it has any nominees at all to a vacant diocese. It's the Chinese sop to help save face for the Vatican and make it seem like it is getting something for its abject total surrender to the Chinese, and all for what? To establish diplomatic relations in order to facilitate an invitation for Bergoglio to visit Beijing?
How, in conscience, can the Bergoglio Vatican be so delusional about the ruthless Godless nature of a Communist regime that has now outlasted by more than quarter century the parent Soviet regime? And what exactly does Bergoglio thinks his diplomats will do for the Church in China except to be Beijing's errand boys in suppressing the anti-regime underground church, so as to leave the playing field free for the official 'Catholic Church' of China, which being no longer subject to the Vatican or to the pope, will no longer be a catholic (small c) church at all, but a true and proper independent 'national church' that is a travesty of the Church – neither holy nor Catholic nor apostolic nor Roman. Beijing may choose call it ‘the Catholic Church in China’ for purposes of its ‘dialog’ with the Vatican, but it really is only the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association taking over the entire infrastructure and institutions of what was the Catholic Church in China (much as the church of Bergoglio has taken over the infrastructure and institutions of the one true Church of Christ). We have here the spectacle of a bogus universal Catholic Church, really the church of Bergoglio, cooperating with an atheistic regime to actualize a bogus ‘national Catholic church’ in China which is in every way a contradiction of everything that a particular Church within the universal Church ought to be.]
Why would the Vatican trust any agreement cosigned by a totalitarian power, given its previous unhappy experiences with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich, both of which systematically violated concordats they concluded with the Holy See?
Why have the Vatican’s diplomats (and perhaps even Pope Francis himself) dismissed warnings from within China, and from the retired bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, about the negative impact of such a deal on those Chinese Catholics who have remained loyal to Rome rather than to the regime-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Association?
Why would the Church violate its own canon law (according to which “no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation, or designation of bishops are conceded to civil authorities”) as a step toward full diplomatic exchange with a regime that routinely violates human rights, often with great cruelty?
What has motivated the dogged pursuit by Vatican diplomats of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and China over the past four decades?
Answering these questions requires three steps back: first to 1870, then to 1929, and finally to 1962.
In 1870, when the forces of the Italian Risorgimento captured Rome and made it the capital of a unified Italy, the last vestiges of the old Papal States (which once encompassed all of central Italy) disappeared, and Pope Pius IX retired behind the Leonine Wall, styling himself the “Prisoner of the Vatican.”
The Holy See, which international law and customary diplomatic practice have long recognized as the juridical embodiment of the pope’s role as universal pastor of the Catholic Church, continued to send and receive ambassadors even as it lacked any territory over which it exercised internationally recognized sovereignty. But Pius’s four successors tried nonetheless to reach an agreement with the new Italian state that would guarantee the pope’s independence from all earthly powers.
That goal was finally achieved by Pius XI in the 1929 Lateran Accords, which created the independent Vatican City State on a 108-acre tract surrounding St. Peter’s Basilica.
But while the Lateran Accords assured the pope’s freedom to conduct his global ministry without interference from another sovereign, the reduction of the pope’s sovereign territory to the Vatican City microstate underscored that, in the future, Holy See diplomacy would have to reply on the exercise of papal moral authority, not the usual tangible instruments of state power.
The largely Italian Vatican diplomatic service never quite grasped this implication of the Lateran Accords, though. Rather, it seems these foreign-policy professionals continued to think that the new Holy See/Vatican City was something like the old Holy See/Papal States: a third-tier European power. And as Italy itself became a less serious actor in world politics, it was natural for Italian papal diplomats to seek some significant role for “Rome” on the global stage, working the system as other third-tier powers did.
Then came October 1962. It has been insufficiently remarked that
the opening of the Second Vatican Council — the four-year meeting of all the world’s Catholic bishops that became the most important event in Catholic history since the Reformation and set the foundations for Catholicism’s current role as a major institutional promoter and defender of human rights [??? That’s a puzzling statement in the light of what Weigel affirms in the next paragraph. How did Ostpolitik help champion human rights at all when it was cooperating with the tramplers of human rights for little crumbs that amounted to a whole lot of nothing for the Catholics it meant to help and protect?] —
coincided precisely with the Cuban missile crisis.
Pope John XXIII and the Vatican diplomatic corps were sufficiently shaken by the possibility of a nuclear war that might have ended Vatican II before it got underway that they devised a profound redirection of Vatican diplomacy toward the European communist world . This became known as Vatican Ostpolitik, and its principal agent was the career Vatican diplomat Archbishop Agostino Casaroli.
[One most lamentable early consequence of this was that Communism as such- and in the early 1960s, it cut a formidable and fearful swathe from Mongolia, China and South Korea in the Far East, across the continent of Asia from the Soviet Union's easternmost outpost in Vladivostok to its satellite republics in Central and southwest Asia, across the Urals and the Caucasus to the eastern half of Europe - was never even mentioned at all in the four sessions of Vatican II nor in any of its documents. That is a blatant and reprehensible historical omission which I don't believe even Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - nor for that matter, Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II - ever discussed about Vatican II.]
Casaroli’s Ostpolitik, which unfolded during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978),
aimed at finding a modus non moriendi, a “way of not dying” (as Casaroli frequently put it), for the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain.
In order to appoint bishops, who could ordain priests and thus maintain the Church’s sacramental or spiritual life under atheist regimes,
[so they thought, anyway!]
- the Vatican ended the anti-communist rhetoric that had characterized its public diplomacy in the 1950s,
- removed senior churchmen who refused to concede anything to communist governments (like Hungary’s Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty and Czechoslovakia’s Cardinal Joseph Beran),
- discouraged any public role for exiled Catholic leaders like Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj,
- urged underground Catholic clergy and laity to cease their resistance to their local communist regimes, and
- diligently sought various forms of agreements with communist governments.
One premise informing this remarkable volte-face was that the Vatican’s once-harsh anti-communist rhetoric had been at least partially to blame for communist regimes’ persecution of the Church;
the theory was that if the Vatican showed itself more accommodating (the buzzword was “dialogue”), such mellowness would be reciprocated. It wasn’t. And by any objective measure, Casaroli’s Ostpolitik was a failure — and in some instances a disaster. [How many modern crimes of appalling magnitude have taken place in our time in the name of fruitless futile 'dialog'! It is a ploy for so-called leaders to make believe they are doing something that I have come to think of - and forgive the simile - as nothing but self-indulgent mental masturbation.]
In Rome, it led to the deep penetration of the Vatican by East bloc intelligence services, a counterintelligence debacle (now fully documented from original sources) that put the Church’s diplomats in an even weaker position in negotiations with their communist counterparts, who frequently knew the Vatican game plan thanks to the work of well-placed moles and informers inside the Roman Curia.
In the countries that were to be the putative beneficiaries of Ostpolitik, there were no improvements of consequence as a result of Casaroli’s shuttle diplomacy, and in fact more damage was done.
- The Hungarian Catholic hierarchy became what amounted to a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hungarian state, which of course meant the Hungarian communist party.
- Repression increased in what was then Czechoslovakia, with regime-friendly faux-Catholic organizations achieving public prominence while underground bishops and priests worked as janitors, window-washers, and elevator repairmen, conducting clandestine ministries at night.
- Ostpolitik did nothing to improve the situation of Catholics in the Soviet Union: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church remained the world’s largest illegal religious community, and Lithuanian Catholic resistance leaders found themselves doing hard time in gulag labor camps.
Ostpolitik had no serious effect in Poland, however, where the wily primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and the charismatic archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, nodded politely to visiting Vatican diplomats but continued to confront the Polish communist authorities with vigorous public protests when they thought that necessary to preserve the Church’s tenaciously held free space in a communist state.
That strategy, in turn, strengthened the most vigorous national Catholic community in the Soviet sphere, even as the Vatican Ostpolitik was weakening local Churches in other Warsaw Pact countries.
When Wojtyla was elected pope in 1978, taking the name John Paul II, the Casaroli Ostpolitik was quietly buried — although the shrewd John Paul appointed Casaroli his secretary of state, thus creating something of a good cop-bad cop strategy. Casaroli would continue his shuttle diplomacy in east-central Europe.
But that, John Paul understood, would provide him useful cover as he, using the megaphone of the papacy, boldly challenged communist human rights violations in his pilgrimages all over the world, most notably on his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979, and then in October of that year from the rostrum of the General Assembly of the United Nations. That two-track strategy was instrumental in igniting the revolution of conscience that shaped the Revolutions of 1989 and the self-liberation of east-central Europe from communism.
Yet the lessons that ought to have been learned from all this — that Ostpolitik was a failure because the appeasement of communist and other authoritarian regimes never works, and that the only real authority the Holy See and the pope have in world politics today is moral authority — were not learned by the heirs of Agostino Casaroli, many of whom are influential figures in Vatican diplomacy today.
At Rome’s Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, Ostpolitik is still presented to future Vatican diplomats as a model of success, and at no level of the Vatican Secretariat of State has there been an intellectual reckoning with the evidence demonstrating the failures of Casaroli’s diplomacy.
The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as Pope Francis in March 2013 has not changed the “Casarolian” cast of mind dominating Vatican diplomacy; quite the opposite, in fact. Bergoglio brought to the papacy a record of resistance to the authoritarian Kirchner regime in his native Argentina, with which he had tangled on several issues. But he had no experience of world politics, and
from the outset of his pontificate, Francis made it clear that he believed that “dialogue,” perhaps his favorite word when speaking of international affairs, is possible with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and Raúl Castro. [In fact, Bergoglio has probably made more headline-generating Communist/Marxist/socialist statements than any of these Communist/Marxist/socialist leaders themselves.]
[
Thus under Francis, the accommodating Casaroli approach to Vatican diplomacy has made a great comeback, while the world-changing achievements of John Paul II, the result of charismatic moral leadership, seem to be virtually ignored by the Church’s senior diplomats. And one result of that comeback is the new démarche with China, which the senior Italians among the Vatican’s diplomats regard as a rising world power with whom they must be a “player.”
John Paul and his successor, Benedict XVI, could have had the deal now being proposed by Beijing, or something very similar to it. Both declined, because they knew it was not a step toward greater freedom for the Catholic Church in China but a step toward greater Catholic subservience to the Chinese Communist regime, a betrayal of persecuted Catholics throughout the People’s Republic of China, and an impediment to future evangelism in China.
Both may also have weighed the fact that any formal Vatican diplomatic exchange with Beijing would necessitate ending diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the first Chinese democracy in history — and that would be a bad signal to the rest of the world about the Vatican’s commitment to Catholicism’s own social doctrine.
Vatican diplomacy today rests on shaky and insecure foundations — and on Italianate fantasies that the 21st-century Holy See can act internationally as if this were 1815, when Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Pope Pius VII’s chief diplomat, was a significant actor at the Congress of Vienna. Those shaky foundations and that fantasy are not a prescription for diplomatic success. They are, rather, a prescription for both diplomatic and ecclesiastical failure, which is the likely result of the deal now being bruited between the Vatican and China.
Bergoglio has this delusion that he can do anything he sets his mind to do, but while I do not doubt that he is dead set on establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing, he probably thinks that by doing so, he may ‘soften’ or even ‘overcome’ the inherent Godlessness of China's Communist leaders and their ideology. But perhaps I’m giving him too much credit – perhaps he really does not mind the scandalous Godlessness of his friends like Evo Morales, Raul Castro and Nicolas Maduro, provided they continue to proclaim they are doing everything to improve the lot of their people even if obviously they are not. But Bergoglio does not seem to care – has he even said a word, for instance, in behalf of the Venezuelan people crushed by the corruption, political arrogance and overall impotence of Maduro’s regime?)]
The title of this op-ed piece in the New York Times is very appropriate, but the writer errs on the side of extreme naivete by postulating that the negotiations revolve around finalizing 'a joint vetting venture' for episcopal nominations in China. It's the fig leaf to hide the shameful abjectness of the Vatican surrender to Beijing. The writer is a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs, and professor of economics at a university in Japan.
Why the pope is genuflecting to China
by Yi-Zheng Lian
February 9, 2018
On Feb. 1, the same day that new repressive regulations of religion went into force in China, the Vatican took a deep bow before Beijing. After long resisting, it finally agreed to recognize several hack bishops designated by the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), even sidelining two of its own long-serving appointees for the occasion.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the outspoken, blogging, 86-year-old retired archbishop of Hong Kong, had recently flown to Vatican City to personally plead the case of the two bishops to the pope himself. How nettlesome. He was shoved off, and has since been called an “obstacle” to a deal between the Vatican and Beijing.
The reasons the Holy See is caving to the (atheist) Communist government are not entirely transparent, but it appears to be hoping for a historic thaw. Diplomatic ties were severed in 1951, not long after the Communists came to power in China, and relations have since been testy at best.
Catholics in China are thought to number between 9 million and 12 million today, with about half of them adhering to underground congregations loyal to the pope in Rome and refusing to recognize a state-sanctioned version of the Church called the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association or, more informally, the “patriotic church.”
One major conflict between the two governments has been the method for appointing bishops: Traditionally a prerogative of the papacy, Beijing has steadily tried to usurp it in China. The deal that the Vatican currently seems to be seeking would likely formalize some joint vetting procedure.
The Vatican justifies its conciliatory stance toward Beijing as an attempt to overcome the schism that has divided the Catholic community in China for nearly seven decades — as “a balm of mercy,” it has said, for the pain caused by the barriers that have prevented Chinese Catholics “from living in communion with each other and with the Pope.”
Rapprochement could also give the pope, nominally at least, ultimate authority over all the Catholics in China — a standing, however symbolic, that may well matter to a Vatican that is losing ground to other Christian denominations among Chinese converts.
[That's a real howler! If he can't even get to name bishops, what ultimate authority, in real terms, could he possibly hope to have over ‘all the Catholics in China’? Moreover, this writer seems to ignore Beijing’s Sinicization policy, whereby no formal or direct influence outside the Communist regime could possibly be allowed into any area of Chinese life. In whatever form the Bergoglio-Beijing concordat may come, whatever language it uses, there is no way it will imply in any way that the Vatican or the pope will have any say at all about what the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association chooses to do in, with and about its ‘national independent church’!]
The total population of Christians in China has grown considerably, from about 4 million in 1949 to perhaps as many as 100 million today. In relative terms, however, Catholics are falling behind. By some estimates, whereas Catholics in China outnumbered Protestants by 3 to 1 in 1949, today Protestants outnumber Catholics by 5 to 1.
A major explanation for the increasing differential is that the Roman Catholic Church wields not only religious and moral authority, but also political and diplomatic power. The Catholic Church has a relatively unified command structure, a well-defined ideology and a disciplined organizational backbone. It has global reach and mass appeal, commands great loyalty and has long demonstrated the ability to survive and expand, all on the merits of peaceful soft power. In each of these ways, it rivals, perhaps even bests, the C.C.P.
And so, naturally, the C.C.P. sees Chinese Catholics’ allegiance to the pope as a direct challenge to their allegiance to the party. Vatican City is also, still, among the 20 states, all small, that recognize Taiwan diplomatically.
Many Protestant churches, although deemed suspect as well, are on better terms with the C.C.P. After a visit to Beijing in 1983, the archbishop of Canterbury gushed about liberalization in China and reportedly praised the emergence of “a church with Chinese characteristics.” [There speaks the pitiable pastor of a community that is hopelessly fractured since it first started kowtowing to the modern world in the early 20th century!]
Like his predecessor, the current Anglican archbishop overseeing Hong Kong and Macau is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a body including luminaries that supposedly advises the C.C.P. but often promotes the party’s interests informally or clandestinely. Both men have tended to support Beijing’s restrictive reading of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and opposed the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014.
Representatives of other faiths have gone further. A vice president of the Buddhist Association of China called President Xi Jinping’s speech to the Chinese Communist Party’s 19th Congress last fall, “the Buddhist sutra of the current age.”
Buddhists in China — who are variously said to number between more than 100 million to more than 240 million — have been treated with a relatively light hand by the party, at least if they are not of the Tibetan kind.
Yet even if brown-nosing seems to pay off, the Vatican’s appeasement of the Chinese government would have great downsides, for itself and for the rest of the world. [ Oooohhh, ‘brown-nosing’ is even more descriptive and appropriate than ‘genuflecting’ to describe what Bergoglio and his diplomats have been doing vis a vis Beijing!]
- By recognizing China’s so-called patriotic church, the Vatican could harm the wholesomeness of Catholic teachings in the country. Sermons given in government-sanctioned churches already have been known to exclude passages of the Bible deemed politically subversive (like the story of Daniel) or to include Communist Party propaganda. [ [Is that any different from Bergoglio’s own blasphemously selective and self-servingly tendentious preaching of the Gospel?]
- Millions of faithful Catholics in China might also soon feel abandoned, perhaps even betrayed, after having suffered decades of oppression. Worse, the government, emboldened by the deal, could well come down even harder on them. In fact, the religious regulations that recently came into effect include much stiffer fines on underground churches and penalties for public-school teachers who give Sunday-school lessons on their own time.
- And then, rapprochement might augur the Vatican’s readiness to eventually stop recognizing Taipei and instead recognize Beijing as truly representing China. Such a shift would alter the delicate balance of power across the Taiwan Strait, as well as harm Taiwan’s vibrant democracy.
- It would also confer legitimacy — and with the pope’s imprimatur! — on authoritarian regimes throughout the world that crack down on churches and sects.
The Catholic Church already has a checkered record dealing with fascist or totalitarian states.
- Pope Pius XII was criticized for betraying the Jews of Europe during World War II: Hewing to what he described as a position of neutrality between the Nazis and the Allies, he never denounced Hitler’s Final Solution.
- After Soviet forces violently repressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Vatican sidelined the outspoken anticommunist Archbishop József Mindszenty in favor of a deal with the new puppet regime.
The Vatican’s eagerness to play catch-up in China today may do it no favors either. Beijing doesn’t have much of a reputation for honoring commitments. Just look at its application of the “one country, two systems” arrangement it promised HongKong, which was supposed to guarantee the city a large degree of autonomy until
2047.
Even under the deal the Vatican seems to want,
the Chinese government could eventually come to control the Catholic Church in China [ [There is no ‘could about it’. It will come to control the entire Church in China the moment it seals any deal with Bergoglio, who foolishly thinks he will outdo the ‘Nixon in China’ stunt which made for great headlines but so what? And what does it say of a pastor who will close the deal with the devil by mercilessly sacrificing the underground Church for his own ‘honor and glory’?] - by, say, simply delaying nominating anyone for bishop or
repeatedly rejecting candidates presented by the Vatican until all the bishops previously selected by the pope have retired or died out.
[This writer seems to be under the impression that any ‘deal’ about naming bishops is possible and for real!]
Bishops ordain priests, and so without bishops, in time there could be no priests, or very few, and Catholicism in China would have died a silent death.
[It is already dying! When the Vatican forces two legitimate bishops to resign their positions to give way to illegitimate bishops of the ‘patriotic Church’ (one of whom had been formally excommunicated by Pope Benedict), and the Vatican’s top diplomat says it is a ‘necessary sacrifice’, then the Vatican itself is aiding and abetting in killing off the authentic Catholic Church in China.]
Four decades ago, when a destitute China was emerging from deep Maoism, Western companies got tipsy at the mere notion of selling deodorant to two billion Chinese armpits. Now that average Chinese have much more disposable income, major international corporations are willing to hand over proprietary technology, stoically endure violent xenophobic outbursts and take on members of the Chinese Communist Party as senior managers rather than risk losing out on the business prospects.
No one, it seems, can resist the lure of the great market of China, for deodorants, cars — or congregants. Not even the Vatican.
[But the Bergoglio Vatican is not catering to China to get more congregants! On the contrary, it is helping to stamp out an underground Church whose numbers are not insignificant. Besides, the immediate objective of all this diabolical dealing with Beijing is to get Bergoglio invited to China as the first pope ever to visit the world’s most populous nation. That’s the only history Bergoglio and his diplomats care about. As for the members of the underground Church, Bergoglio is probably thinking: “But I am really giving them the chance to be martyrs! They can fend for themselves as they have done these past 70 years! What does not kill them can only make them stronger, and what kills them will make them martyrs!”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/02/2018 04:42]