THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

How the China deal betrays
the Second Vatican Council
by Matthew Schmitz

Thursday, 27 Sep 2018

Last week, the Vatican signed a concordat with a totalitarian regime. The Chinese government, which has harassed and tortured millions of Christians, will now have a role in selecting Catholic bishops. The agreement is provisional and the details are vague, but that much is clear.

Whatever one makes of the deal, it inarguably constitutes a break with the Church’s support of religious freedom as expressed in the Second Vatican Council. Before Vatican II, Church officials generally had not sought to secure freedom for the Church by appealing to neutral and broadly applicable principles of religious freedom. Instead, they signed concordats that granted the Church certain privileges, often in exchange for the authorities’ receiving some say in Catholic life.

The China deal is an agreement of this older kind. In exchange for a role in choosing bishops, China will effectively acknowledge the Pope’s authority over Chinese Catholics – something the regime has never before conceded.

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo has defended the deal by claiming that China “observes the common good and it has proved its ability to great missions like fighting against poverty and pollution”. This is a novel way to describe the regime.

According to a UN report in August, Chinese authorities are currently detaining a million people (out of a total population of 11 million) in the western province of Xinjiang, home to the Uighur Muslim minority. An additional two million people in the province are undergoing some form of re-education. Cadres monitor and report on every family. Cameras have been placed inside some homes.

Restrictions on religious life extend well beyond Xinjiang.
- Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has bulldozed and burned Protestant and Catholic churches.
- Gao Zhisheng, a Protestant human rights lawyer, released a book last year describing his torture at the hands of Chinese officials. They beat and electrocuted him before secretly imprisoning him in a camp, where he suffered further psychological torture.
- Gao calls the regime “totalitarian”. Unlike authors who apply that descriptor to Western governments, he was secretly detained following the book’s publication.

How could the Catholic Church make a deal with such a regime? Critics of the agreement have tended to present it as yet another blunder by Pope Francis. But it indicates a broader loss of confidence in the political vision of Vatican II.

After World War II, many Catholics concluded that concordats with Mussolini and Hitler had discredited the Church. Shame regarding these deals, combined with a certain optimism about the direction of history, led many to assert that a “free Church in a free society” was the future in the West and across the world.

Conservative Catholics trained their ire on socialist regimes, while liberal Catholics focused on right-wing dictatorships. But both used anti-totalitarian rhetoric to argue that the Church should stand on the side of liberty.

This outlook received its fullest expression in Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, which suggested that the Church should support neutral religious liberties rather than seek privileges from the state. The Church continued to arrange concordats with smaller countries like Haiti and Vietnam, but broad-based defence of religious liberty was the ideal. The fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to vindicate the liberal belief that the world would turn toward freedom.

The China deal reflects a retreat from the political vision of the council fathers. Vatican II, which sought to disentangle Church and state, taught that the Pope alone should appoint bishops: “For the purpose of duly protecting the freedom of the Church and of promoting more conveniently and efficiently the welfare of the faithful, this holy council desires that in future no more rights or privileges of election, nomination, presentation, or designation for the office of bishop be granted to civil authorities.”

Popes had only gained this exclusive power of episcopal appointment at the end of the 19th century as liberal and secular states renounced the rights once claimed by Christian powers. In 1829, 555 of 646 bishops who recognised the Pope owed their appointments to the state. By the end of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope had almost untrammeled freedom in picking bishops.

Counter to expectations, this change did not create a hierarchy notable for courage and independence. As John O’Malley has observed, it made for an episcopacy that was “more docile in all spheres”. If bishops chosen by the Chinese state are supine before secular powers, if they lack apostolical courage, then they merely resemble their brother bishops in jurisdictions where the Church enjoys perfect liberty.

Some Catholic commentators have insisted that the agreement with China is not a concordat. Like Sánchez Sorondo’s minimisation of the Chinese regime’s crimes, this is an attempt to avoid facing reality. Church leaders can no longer pretend to be much purer or more committed to human rights than the authors of the Reichskonkordat. Without anyone noticing, the age of Catholic liberalism has come to an end.


Did Pope Francis just make China Protestant?
The long-term consequences of the new provisional agreement
By GEORGE WEIGEL

September 24, 2018

Attempts to defend the recent provisional agreement between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China, which was signed on September 22, have rung increasingly hollow over the past few days.

That pattern began before the ink was dry in Beijing, as Pope Francis’s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, issued a statement claiming that now “for the first time all the bishops in China are in communion with the Bishop of Rome, with the Successor of Peter.” Really? Weren’t “all the bishops in China” in full communion with the pope before the Chinese Communists set up their front church, the Patriotic Catholic Association?

Parolin also tried to justify the provisional agreement on the grounds that Pope Francis, like his immediate predecessors, “looks with particular care to the Chinese people” — a claim that, translated from Vaticanese, suggests that John Paul II and Benedict XVI would have made the same deal Francis and Parolin reportedly did. But that deal was available to John Paul II and Benedict XVI and they didn’t make it, because they knew that giving first rights of nomination over Chinese bishops to the Chinese state or the Chinese Communist Party was both a violation of the Church’s own canon law and a prescription for a puppet episcopate.

Then there was Andrea Riccardi, one of the founders of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic renewal movement firmly lodged in the progressivist camp. “Today,” Riccardi wrote, “the pope’s representative enters Peking [sic] through the front door. No more secret negotiations, but an official agreement that recognizes the dignity of the Holy See and Chinese Catholicism.”

How utterly, totally Italianate: Bella figura [literally, 'beautiful figure', but the idiom more or less means putting lipstick on a pig, i.e., trying to prettify something inhrently ugly] trumps again, and “dignity” is imagined to be a substitute for courage and fidelity to the truth.

And of course Riccardi was spouting nonsense about “no more secret negotiations,” for the text of the provisional agreement is itself secret, and the charade by which the Chinese Communist Party will nominate bishops for a Vatican thumbs-up or thumb-down will be as transparent as mud.

What has happened, one wonders, to the commitment to lift up the witness of the “new martyrs” of the 20th and 21st centuries, which the Sant’Egidio Community honors at the Church of San Bartolomeo all’Isola in Rome? Will those martyred in China while Vatican diplomats were caving in to Chinese Communist demands be remembered at that shrine?

There were a few adults left standing in the wake of the provisional agreement.
- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan) issued a measured but pointed statement, expressing the wish that “this accord will enhance religious freedom in China and allow the Chinese Catholic Church to become an integral part of the universal Church.”
- Then the Taiwanese noted what Cardinal Parolin, in full Neville Chamberlain mode, could not bring himself to say last week when the agreement was signed: “The world watches China increasingly tightening control over religious practices.”
- Then came an expression of hope, perhaps forlorn, but in any event necessary: “Taiwan trusts that the Holy See has made appropriate arrangements to ensure that Catholic adherents in China will receive due protection and not be subject to repression. Taiwan hopes that once the agreement is implemented, members of the Catholic community in China will enjoy true religious autonomy.”

The redoubtable Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, made every conceivable effort to put some sense into Vatican diplomacy in the matter of deal-making with the PRC over the past decade. But having failed in that mission, the cardinal, in a new book, For Love of My People I Will Not Be Silent, underscored, once again, the crucial point that the Vatican diplomats could never grasp: that this should have been about evangelization, not politics.

Throughout the negotiating process, those diplomats and the mouthpieces of the current pontificate kept insisting that the Holy See had to have a place at the table in Beijing, for China was the rising global hegemon. (How, precisely, kowtowing to the hegemon was supposed to win his respect, and therefore his ear, and perhaps even his cooperation, was never specified.)

Cardinal Zen knew better, however. As he argues in his book, the Vatican was jeopardizing Catholicism’s future in China by making this deal. The Chinese Communist regime is not eternal, Zen wrote; and if today “you line up behind the regime, tomorrow our Church will not be welcome in the reconstruction of a new China.”

And this, of course, has been all along the crucial reason not to play Let’s Make a Deal with the regime of Xi Jinping. It is not atavistic Cold Warriorism — another charge that Vatican apologists fling at critics of the provisional agreement — to see in the present deal an obstacle to the evangelization of China in the future.

An immense moral capital is being built up in China by those religious communities that refuse to bend to Communist repression. By contrast, religious communities identified with the regime will bear the stigma of that regime when it collapses, as Communist regimes inevitably do.

-Xi Jinping’s increasing repression, which is not limited to religious persecution, does not bespeak a regime confident of its stability;
- neither does his reversion to Maoist one-man lifetime rule.
- China has immense social problems, bad demographics, increasing corruption, and an educated population restive about income distribution and Big Brother social control (not least of cyberspace).
Add up those factors and it seems more than likely that Cardinal Zen is right: Chinese Communism is mortal. And when the regime disappears, then what?

Then, I suggest, China will be the greatest field of Christian mission since the Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere in the 16th century.
- Unlike India, where a thick, culturally transmitted religious system makes Christian evangelization difficult, China will be open mission territory.
- For Mao’s Cultural Revolution essentially destroyed traditional Chinese religion, and a post-Communist society looking for meaning as well as for equitably distributed material prosperity will be fertile ground for the offer of the gospel.

And who will make that offer plausibly?
- Those who have suffered for the sake of Christ and the truth, such as the Protestant house churches that are rapidly growing in the PRC? - Or those who have made deals with the old persecutors? The questions, asked, seem to answer themselves.

Pope Francis and his Italian curial diplomats may think that they are setting in motion a process that will give Catholicism a voice in China. It is just as possible, however, and indeed it is far more likely, that they have made a deal that will give a massive evangelical advantage to Protestantism in the China of the future.