THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

When all the talk began about the Bergoglio Vatican seeking some sort of a deal with the Communist government in Beijing (with the immediate goal of establishing
diplomatic relations, thereby facilitating a visit by Bergoglio to Beijing, which would be a 'great' historic coup), what came to my mind right away was something
John Kennedy had said about “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger (who) ended up inside the tiger" - the tiger in this case, of course,
being a behemoth tiger, and changing the word 'power' in JFK's line to the simpler 'deal' which is really what the pope has been negotiating. It is a measure of
Bergoglio's hubris that he thinks he can get away and not be eaten up the behemoth tiger that Beijing is!

Apparently, the Chinese have a similar proverb, if somewhat a weaker expression, that says "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount" which is said about embarking
on a course of action which subsequently cannot safely be abandoned. So if Bergoglio commits to sacrifice the underground Church in China, as he seems
ready to do, to his ultimately foolish and naive personal political agenda - in which he fancies himself as the ultimate power broker who will single-
handedly and miraculously 'redeem' China from communism (in the same way he fancied himself as the one person who would finally bring Israel
and Palestine together) - then he is really riding for a fall from the tiger's back, straight into its open jaws!

In this article, the writer warns about the Albanian experience - in which we can ponder that if a tiny country and its Communist dictator could do what was
done to the Church in Albania, can Bergoglio really expect any 'mercy' from his prospective putative allies who have made it clear that they intend to
SINICIZE the Catholic Church in China? In which effectively, the 'Chinese Catholic Church' would be the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association,
which has been the de facto 'official catholic church' in China for decades. And which is certainly not going to take any direction from the Vatican
because to do so would mean 'foreign interference' in the official church.

Bergoglio thinks the Chinese will give the Vatican 'a say' in the appointment of bishops in China? Yeah right, that 'say' will be limited to saying Yes to
whoever the CPCA names - the meaningless proviso being a fig leaf the Chinese will concede to help Bergoglio save face. (Asians understand the importance
of saving face and will allow their adversaries that if they have already won the lion's share of the deal). The Bergoglio Vatican is deluding itself if it thinks it can
'ride' the Chinese tiger and not end up being devoured by it.

Ms. Murzaku is Professor of Church History and director of the Catholic Studies Program at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Her research has been published in
multiple articles and seven books, and is currently writing a book entitled Mother Teresa: The Saint of the Peripheries Who Became Catholicism’s Centerpiece.

'The smaller cage is the better cage':
What has China to do with Albania?
The decades-long persecution of the Church in Albania by its Communist regime
provides a significant case for the Holy See to ponder as it seeks
a 'deal' with China
by Ines Angeli Murzaku

March 7, 2018


"There are two lions in the world today/
One in Asia and one in Europe,/
Mao Zedong in China/
And our Enver in Tirana."

This verse illustrates the friendly relations between Albania and China, which lasted for seventeen years (1961-1978), when Albania broke up relations with China and was hermetically sealed off from the rest of the Communist and Western world.

But, what has China to do with Albania? Tirana with Beijing? Mao Zedong with Enver Hoxha?

More than one might imagine: the building of socialism that would lead to Communism, the Cultural and Ideological Revolution, and suppression of religion, to mention some highlights in the Sino-Albanian relationship.

After Mao Zedong, otherwise known as Chairman Mao, unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China in 1965, Albania’s Communist leader Enver Hoxha launched his own version of Cultural and Ideological Revolution.

Following Chairman Mao’s model, Hoxha reformed the military, government, and economy.
- Military ranks were abolished and a system of political commissars was introduced in the army.
- Fighting against the bourgeois remnants and a white-collar mentality, salaries of mid-and high-level officials and intellectuals were slashed.
- People were required to work in the factories and in agriculture. - Collectivization of private property, farms, and husbandry spread to even the most remote regions of Albania.

For Mao, as for his satellite Hoxha, the Cultural and Ideological Revolution became a deadly weapon to regain total control and exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat all over the country.

Hoxha’s Cultural-Ideological Revolution instituted a reign of terror over dissident intellectuals, educators, writers, artists, and the Catholic Church — especially Catholic leaders and clergy. This Chinese-style reign of terror and persecution reached its peak in 1967 when Albanian authorities conducted an unprecedented campaign to eradicate religion from the country, claiming that the “reactionary religion” had been cause for division among Albanians and had kept the country “backward”.
- Churches, mosques, monasteries, seminaries, and religious-run schools were closed and then either destroyed or repurposed into warehouses, theaters, and gymnasiums.
- The campaign culminated in Albania becoming the world’s first atheistic state in 1967, applauded as Hoxha’s greatest achievement.

Albania was one of the Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain where the Holy See’s Ostpolitik principles for achieving partial and fast solutions were not applied. This actually served well for the preservation of the faith of the Catholic Church and the credibility of Catholic clergy among the people of Albania.

Although Catholicism is a minority religion in Albania, the severe persecution endured during Communism elevated the status of the Catholic Church among Muslims, Eastern Orthodox, and even atheists. The Communist persecution in Albania was so radical that even Sunni Islam, Bektashi, and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders who made “deals” with the government and were nationalized did not escape persecution, even though — to take up language used now to describe the current situation in China — their “cages were bigger.”

Instead, the Catholic Church in Albania became the twentieth-century Church of the catacombs: the cage got increasingly smaller, but the faithful became more faithful and the faith grew stronger. Endurance and perseverance won in the end. The Church was alive after five decades of persecution. As Tertullian wrote in the late second century: the blood of martyrs became the seed of Christians.

Before Hoxha’s regime reached its goal in 1967 — the extermination of religion, especially Catholicism, and making Albania the first atheistic country in the world — the Communist government’s focus from 1944 to 1948 was to create a National Albanian Catholic Church. It would have no connections to the Holy See or the Pope; bishops and priests would be ordained under government auspices. This, of course, sounds quite similar to the current situation in the People’s Republic of China and the negotiations with the Vatican.

How was the nationalizing platform applied in Albania? In May 1945 the Apostolic Delegate to Albania, Archbishop Leone G.B. Nigris, was expelled from the country. Then the regime summoned the Metropolitan Archbishop of Shkodra, Northern Albania, Primate of the Church Gasper Thaci, and the Archbishop of Durres Vincent Prendushi, demanding they sever any relations with Rome, establish a new Albanian National Church, and give the Catholic Church’s allegiance to the Communist regime. In exchange for the deal, Hoxha promised his government’s “conciliatory attitude” and dialoguing with the Church. Thaci and Prendushi refused to cooperate and never entertained the idea of separating from Rome — and they paid with their lives for their disobedience.

As the Iron Curtain was descending over the continent (as Winston Churchill declared on March 5, 1946), further restrictions were enforced upon the Church: under the motto “Religion is Reactionary,” - the Albanian Political Bureau decided not to allow the religious to leave the country for theological training.
- Seminary education was to be taught by national, government-approved clergy and the theological curricula were required to have the government’s seal of approval.
- Courses and theological-academic curricula in religious run schools, including the Albanian Pontifical Seminary, were required to follow “the party’s line.” But there was more infiltration:
- The government and the party officials would choose “the right” candidates for seminary training and religious vocations. Obviously, those individuals who had shown loyalty to the Communist regime were chosen to pursue seminary training, so the government planted spies among the clergy to undermine it from within.

When the first wave of Catholic clergy persecutions and executions had its effects, Enver Hoxha summoned Bishop Fran Gjini in Tirana and ordered him, as he had done in the past with Thaci and Prendushi, to sever ties to Rome and lead the Catholic population in professing allegiance to the government. Gjini became the substitute Apostolic Delegate. Hoxha threatened Gjini with persecution unless he led his flock to the government’s side.

Fearing great pressure, Gjini tried to bring some reconciliation and started a dialogue with the government. He wrote an open letter to Enver Hoxha offering the Church’s cooperation in “reconstructing the nation.” However, Hoxha ignored Gjini’s letter and arrested him on the charge of spreading anti-Communist propaganda and agitation. Gjini was executed in 1948 with eighteen other clergy and lay people.

Negotiations for a National Albanian Church resumed in 1949. This time the government strongly demanded a complete separation of the Albanian Catholic Church from the Holy See. In order to force an agreement, more clergy arrests were made.

After lengthy and difficult discussions, a compromise was reached: the government gave the Church freedom to keep sovereignty in spiritual matters and to keep its links with the Holy See.

But deception was on the way. The official Communist organ Zeri I Popullit (The Voice of the People) falsified the agreement between Church and state and announced that the Catholic Church of Albania had severed all ties to the Holy See. The Catholic clergy felt deceived and betrayed by the government. They confronted the government emphasizing their loyalty and allegiance to the Holy Father and the Vatican. Meanwhile, the government used nationalism to keep discontent among people in check as it prepared the final blow against the Catholic Church.

The Holy See today knows what happened in Albania and how the Church became the Church of the catacombs and martyrs for almost five decades. The Albanian prelates never agreed to nationalize, or albanize, the Catholic Church; they refused to make deals or give any concessions to the Communist government. They stood up and paid with their lives for their loyalty to Christ and to the Holy Father. They did not apostatize. Their last words were “Long live Christ the King! Long Live Albania.”

Albania is one more lesson from history to consider before the disturbing deal is finalized between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China.

Cardinal Agostino Casaroli’s Ostpolitik during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) did not quite make it to Albania. Casaroli’s modus non moriendi (way of not dying) became ars morendi (art of dying) for the clergy and the faithful who resisted and died for their faith in Albania. Their toils and innumerable sufferings in the concentration or re-education Communist camps were kept fresh in the minds and hearts of the believers and non-believers alike. The places of their deaths became Albania’s new shrines. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, was with the people, suffering and martyred with them.

The Albanian Catholic Church never lost its credibility or let the faithful down by making deals with the government. It understood that the Communist government would betray it. If the Church would have nationalized, or albanized, it would not have been the universal Catholic Church anymore, but subservient to the Communist government and a department of the government. In the end, the smaller Albanian cage proved to be a far better cage.

More importantly, the Church evangelized by martyrdom, and produced “secret” martyrs. “How many today are Christ’s secret martyrs, bearing witness to the Lord Jesus!” commented Saint Ambrose, echoing Psalm 118.

No deal with an atheistic Communism regime is ever a good deal.
- St. John Paul II, who knew Communism “in his bones”, would have never made any deal with the Communist persecutor. He was not afraid to stand up and to discontinue the Vatican’s Ostpolitik, inspiring his bishops to stand up to the Communists as the Albanian bishops did.
- The same with Benedict XVI, who specifically warned that “compliance with those authorities is not acceptable when they interfere unduly in matters regarding the faith and discipline of the Church” in his 2007 Letter to the to the Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of the Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of China.

So, what has China to do with Albania? The persecution of the Catholic Church in Albania by the Communist government provides a significant case for the Holy See to ponder.

Dialogue and pastoral-soft, ambiguous approaches do not work in Communist countries such as the People’s Republic of China, where the dictatorship of the proletariat is at work. In these countries, it is likely that the smaller cage is the better cage.


And how, one asks, can the Bergoglio Vatican keep silent, as it has been, in the face of the recent desecrations perpetrated by the Chinese regime on Catholic churches in China? Fr. Cervellera, editor of AsiaNews, an agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, took it upon himself to express the outrage that Magister's 'pope in waiting' Cardinal Parolin ought to be saying as the Vatican Secretary of State. But he won't, of course, because he appears to be the chief architect of Bergoglio's 'kowtow to China' policy... Sandro Magister entitled his reprint of this article "The Vatican bows, and here's how China says thanks".

Crosses, domes, statues destroyed:
The new Sinicizing Cultural Revolution
by Fr. Bernardo Cervellera
Editor

March 2, 2018

"It's a new Cultural Revolution": this was the most frequent online comment in reaction to photos of the church of Yining (Xinjiang)
stripped of the crosses that stood on the building, of the statues that stood on its tympanum and the decorations and paintings that
embellished the facade.



The photo above, left, shows the color, the momentum, the lightness of the domes and wall decorations, the crosses on the top
of the building, before their destruction. The photo on the right shows the "after".

Everything was destroyed by order of the government on February 27 and 28, just a few weeks after the meeting
between the Chinese and Vatican delegations, which reportedly resulted in the drafting of a "historic" agreement
on the nominations of bishops in the Chinese Catholic Church.

Yining, 700 km west of the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi, has a Catholic community of a few hundred faithful.

The reference to the Cultural Revolution is inevitable: In the period from 1966 to 1976 the Red Guards mobilized by MaoZedong and the Gang of Four [which included his wife Jiang Qing - after Mao died in 1976, his successors imprisoned the Gang of Four, and in 1991, the fourth Madame Mao committed suicide in prison] implemented the most extreme form of communism by destroying churches, temples, pagodas, prayer books, statues, paintings to annihilate all religion.

But the Cultural Revolution today comes under the rubric of 'sinicisation', defined by [China's newly empowered Supremo for life,] President Xi Jinping, three years ago and reaffirmed at the Party Congress last October as "adhering to and developing religious theories with Chinese characteristics", adhering to the principle of "independence", adapting religion to socialist society, and resisting "religious infiltration from abroad".

The Cross is one such 'religious infiltration from abroad'. In the church of Yining, not only were the two crosses topping the domes taken down, but all the crosses inside the church were taken out, including the images illustrating the Stations of the Cross, and the crosses that decorated the pews.

The iconoclastic fury has also affected other cities. Even before last Christmas, all the crosses from the church of Manas were destroyed, and there are rumors that the same happened in the church of Hutubi.

The comparison with the Cultural Revolution does not stop there. Just like then, it is forbidden for believers to pray even in private, in their homes. The police threaten that if they find two people praying together in their home, they will be arrested and forced to undergo re-education.

Under the new regulations on religious activities, proposed last September and implemented last February 1st,
- worship can only be carried out in church, at the times set by the government. Any other place is considered an "illegal place" and those who break such regulations will be subject to prison, fines, expropriation of the building that houses illegal religious activity.
- Even private homes are now considered an "illegal place of worship": in every private house religious conversation or prayer is forbidden, under threat of arrest. The faithful can pray only in church, during Sunday service.
- All churches must display a sign at their entrance announcing that the building is "forbidden to minors under the age of 18" must be exposed because children and young people are prohibited from participating in religious rites.

It should be noted that the churches referred to here are officially registered churches. The point is that "sinicization" implies submission to the Chinese Communist Party, which must act as an "active guide" of religions, on which their life or death, every construction and every destruction, depends.

The ruthless and suffocating control of the Party on religions can only be explained by fear. It is now everyone's experience in China - confirmed by various sociologists - that the country is in the midst of an impressive religious renaissance, to the point that over 80% of the population has some spiritual beliefs and that at least one fifth of the Party members secretly adhere to some form of religion.

All this promises more control and persecution in the future. "I am very sad," a faithful of Urumqi confides to AsiaNews, "that the Vatican is compromising with this government. In this way it becomes an accomplice of those who want our annihilation".


In the following article, Steven Mosher, an American social scientist, pro-life activist and author who specializes in demography and in Chinese population control, speaks about the present China-Vatican 'collusion' to crush the underground Church in China, from his personal knowledge and first-hand exposure to the situation in China. He is the president of the Population Research Institute, an advocate for human rights in China, and has been instrumental in exposing abuses in China's one-child policy as well as other human rights abuses in population control programs around the world.

Parolin and the China negotiations:
He is so eager to get an agreement that he has
made it clear he would accede to any demand
by Steven W. Mosher

February 22, 2018

Not long after I became Catholic in the early 1990s, I traveled to China to learn more about the fate of my fellow believers under communism. They were divided into two opposing camps, or so I believed at the time, with some belonging to the state-controlled church – the so-called Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association – while others belonged to the Catholic Church in communion with Rome.

Truth be told, I did not think much of those who attended the “Patriotic churches.” I believed that these were small-“c” catholics who had compromised with, or entirely capitulated to, the party’s demands to sever ties with the Universal Church and its head, the bishop of Rome.

My sympathy was reserved for the Catholics of the Underground Church. These were bishops, priests, and lay Catholics who had courageously refused the party’s demands to break with Rome in 1958. Instead, they had gone into the catacombs, risking arrest, imprisonment, torture, and sometimes even death to remain faithful. Led over the decades by brave bishops secretly ordained by the pope, these Catholics had endured decades of persecution while remaining loyal to the one true faith.

In short, I believed that the members of the Underground Church were heroic, while the pewsitters in the Patriotic Church were more or less craven.

Then I paid a call to the Vatican’s unofficial emissary to China, whom we will call Monsignor Nonini. The monsignor’s status was, of course, anomalous, given the lack of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and China. He was accredited to the Republic of China in Taiwan and had his offices in British-governed Hong Kong, but nearly all of his day-to-day work involved dealing with the Church in China.

Monsignor Nonini was in close contact with the bishops of both the Underground and the Patriotic churches and had a surprising – and much more encouraging – story to tell about their relationship with each other, and with Rome.

“The deep divisions of the past are well on their way to being healed,” he told me. “After the end of the Cultural Revolution there was a general amnesty declared, and the Underground bishops and priests who had been imprisoned for decades for refusing to join the Patriotic church were released from jail and have been evangelizing throughout China.”

As far as the Patriotic church was concerned, Nonini surprised me by stating that one hundred percent of the laity, and nearly all its priests and bishops, had remained loyal to the Magisterium. “Nearly all the illicitly ordained bishops have asked the Holy Father to be recognized as legitimate,” he told me. “And nearly all, after we examine their character and behavior, have been so recognized. The only exceptions are the Patriotic bishops of Beijing, Shanghai, and a couple of other major cities. They have made too many compromises.”

He summed up by saying, “The Church is more unified now than at any time since the Communist Revolution. Churches are being rebuilt, and seminaries are being reopened. Although it may appear from the outside that there are still two churches in China, inside of China, there is only one.”

I was overjoyed to learn that the Underground Church was increasingly able to come out of the catacombs and was, in many parts of China, openly preaching the Gospel and making converts. Even more surprising to me was that the Patriotic church, which had begun as a communist front organization intended to co-opt and gradually extinguish Catholicism throughout China, had been transformed from within by faithful Catholics who saw themselves as part of the Universal Church.

The newfound unity of Catholics in China that Msgr. Nonini described to me had nothing to do with either political pressure from the party or political overtures to Beijing by Vatican diplomats. It had come about from the bottom up, not from the top down.

It was not a perfect solution – some of the deep wounds of decades of politically fomented division remained – but it was a workable one. It had, after all, been worked out at the parish and diocesan levels by the real stakeholders – Chinese Catholics themselves – with the quiet encouragement and support of the then-holy father, Pope John Paul II.

The officially atheistic Communist Party and its agents remained a brooding, hostile presence over both church communities but by common agreement, it was kept out of the local arrangements that allowed Catholics from both to coexist, even cooperate. Underground bishops, with the permission of the Vatican, named their own successors. The Patriotic Association named its own bishops, but these then almost always sought, and almost always got, consecration by the pope.

This was the more or less happy situation that obtained in the long-suffering Chinese Church at the dawn of the 21st century.

Then the Vatican Secretariat of State, which has representatives in all but a handful of countries around the world, decided to enter into formal talks with the PRC. Pietro Cardinal Parolin, who had earlier been involved with the establishment of diplomatic relations with Mexico and ongoing negotiations with Vietnam, was put in charge of the effort. He established direct contact with Beijing in 2005 with the goal of signing a written agreement with the atheistic regime over the appointment of bishops.

This was a major blunder on several counts.

First, it drew the attention of the Chinese Party-State to the activities of the Catholic Church in China. Whereas Mexico has been predominantly Catholic for centuries, and Vietnam has one of the largest Catholic populations in Asia, Catholics in China were a small minority, scattered in communities throughout the length and breadth of China. As such, they were able to evangelize, build churches, and even open seminaries, all while attracting relatively little hostile attention from the central government. “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away,” as the Chinese say.

Once Beijing entered into formal negotiations with the Vatican, however, the Party-State began to pay a lot more attention to the activities of the domestic followers of this “hostile foreign power.” In other words, the mere fact of negotiations put a target on the backs of Chinese Catholics. The “space” in which it had operated began to shrink under the unblinking eye of state surveillance.

Vatican diplomats seem not to have realized that they were dealing with a one-party dictatorship that was far more brutal, and far less tolerant of any expressions of religious faith, than Mexico in the 1990s or Vietnam in the 2000s. For in the view of the CCP, all belief in transcendental religions, especially those with foreign connections like Catholicism, is suspect, even treasonous.

The problem goes even deeper than this. As I write in Bully of Asia, since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese Communist Party has been promoting an extremely toxic form of national narcissism. The Chinese people are constantly being told that they, their culture, and their country are naturally superior to any other people, culture, or country that has ever existed. To be numbered among the descendants of the dragon, party propaganda insists, is to be part of the greatest phenomenon in human history. It means that you are part of the “Kingdom at the Center of the Earth” and that you deserve dominion over the lesser folk from the fringes.

The state religion of China, in other words, is China itself. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is its catechism, the members of the party are its priesthood, and “core leader” Xi Jinping serves as its high priest. The whole of China serves as its temple, within whose sacred precincts its people are encouraged to worship their own collective greatness – and “core leader” Xi, of course.

This is why Cardinal Parolin’s insistence to Chinese leaders that “the Church in China does not want replace the state” fails to allay their suspicions. It draws upon a Western Church-state distinction that simply did not exist in Chinese history and that the Chinese Communist Party, in the present moment, is doing its level best to extinguish once again.

Indeed, this and other ill-informed statements may actually heighten the suspicions of China’s senior leaders, given that they believe, along with China’s ancient strategist, Sun Tzu, that “all warfare is deception.”

But even if they accept Cardinal Parolin’s claim that in China (unlike, say, in Poland) the Church does not want to replace the state as state, there is still the problem that it wants to replace the state as church. In China, remember, the state aspires to be the church, and all Chinese are expected to be loyal members.

But perhaps the biggest blunder made by Vatican diplomats in their on-again, off-again negotiations with China has been insisting, after the fashion in Western diplomatic circles, on the need for a formal written agreement. An informal understanding would have been far more appropriate in the Chinese cultural context.

Consider the position of a communist functionary in the Bureau of Religious Affairs who is, shall we say, not unsympathetic to the Catholic Church. Such a functionary might well find it possible to keep to the terms of an informal understanding about the creation of bishops, even if the terms of that understanding were not entirely pleasing to his superiors.

There is a precedent for such a situation. There was, for a while, an informal arrangement between the Bureau of Religious Affairs and the Vatican to the effect that the former would nominate, and the latter would approve, new bishops for the Patriotic church.

That arrangement, not surprisingly, went aground not long after formal negotiations began in 2015. Why? Primarily because the Vatican asked for it to be put in writing. As a result of this blunder, at least eight bishops have been illegally “ordained” by the Chinese Communist Party in the years since.

It is not hard to see why asking a communist functionary to draw up a formal written agreement would end any hope of real compromise. What functionary would dare draw up, much less urge his superiors to sign, an agreement giving the Vatican – which is to say a foreign power – any real control over the appointment of Chinese bishops in a Chinese-run church? Party leaders would be apoplectic at the mere suggestion that China’s sovereignty be violated in this way. Any functionary who suggested otherwise would, at a minimum, be removed.

As if the above missteps by Vatican diplomats were not enough, China itself, under Xi Jinping’s dictatorial rule, is becoming more and more hostile to religious belief and expression. At last October’s Party Congress, Xi demanded tighter controls over religious activity, insisting that the party “exercise overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country.”

As a result, new regulations banning unauthorized religious activity were issued on February 1. According to a priest of the Underground Church, the new rules state that “all religious sites must be registered, no religious activities can be held beyond registered venues, non-registered clergymen are forbidden to host religious liturgies, and that minors and party members are forbidden from entering churches. … The living space for the Church is getting less and less.”

Has anyone in the Vatican read these new regulations, which make it clear that China is quickly reverting to Maoist type? Has it occurred to anyone there that now may be a particularly inauspicious time to force the Underground Church into the embrace of the Chinese Communist Party? [I suppose that a Vatican so shamelessly kowtowing to the Chinese simply chooses to 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' about the Chinese.]

Despite Beijing’s increasing intransigence, Cardinal Parolin has continued to pursue a written agreement. His unseemly eagerness has made it clear to everyone, not least to his counterparts in Beijing, that he would accede to almost any demand. Not surprisingly, Beijing has gone for the jugular: the complete extinction of the Underground Church, starting with its bishops.

In order to reach an agreement, China informed the Vatican’s Secretary of State, two things must happen:
- First, the Holy Father must, without exception, consecrate all the Patriotic bishops that he and Pope Benedict, for very good reasons, had previously rejected.
- Second, he must eliminate the Underground Church, starting with its bishops. Elderly Underground bishops must be forcibly retired and replaced with Patriotic bishops of Beijing’s choosing, while younger Underground bishops must be reassigned to subordinate roles in the Patriotic church.

On the mere promise of a future agreement, the Vatican has bowed to these demands. This is why we have recently been treated to the heartbreaking spectacle of 88-year-old Underground bishop Peter Zhuang being forced, by Cardinal Parolin’s emissaries, to hand over his Shantou diocese to excommunicated Patriotic bishop Huang Bingzhang. This is also why a younger Patriotic bishop, Joseph Guo of Fujian province, has been demoted to be an assistant to an illegitimate Patriotic bishop.

This process will obviously continue until the last of the 30-odd Underground bishops have been sidelined and silenced, one way or another.

It is the prospect of this “sell-out” of the Underground Church that sent Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen to Rome, to plead the cause of his Chinese co-believers to the holy father himself.

Pope Francis reportedly told Cardinal Zen that “we don’t want another Mindszenty.” But these wrongheaded, politically naïve negotiations have already created, in Bishop Zhuang, “another Mindszenty.”

And now we have the prospect of several dozen more to follow.