We hear a lot about China these days: from official Vatican narratives surrounding the effectiveness of the controversial Sino-Vatican Pact to this week’s visit to Hong Kong of Bishop Joseph Li-Shan, leader of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), at the invitation of the Bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Stephen Chow.
Benedict Rogers, whose experience of these matters is unsurpassed, has already questioned the wisdom of Cardinal Chow’s overtures to the CCPA in the Herald, while Lord Patten of Barnes, the last British governor of Hong Kong, has described the Vatican’s approach as “self-delusion”, and little more than a “policy of appeasement” towards “thuggish dictators”.
Until 2018 the underground Church in China, loyal to Rome since Mao Zedong’s power grab in 1949, and persecuted accordingly, was ministered to by bishops in communion with Rome who rejected the Chinese Communist Party’s jurisdiction in Church affairs. Meanwhile the CCPA provided a parallel structure of bishops and dioceses as a branch of the Chinese state.
The bishops of the CCPA were validly ordained, but illicitly – and so they were automatically excommunicate. Nevertheless Rome allowed an element of ambiguity to endure, perhaps in the hope of easing future rapprochement. The Sino-Vatican pact of 2018 was intended to bring order to the situation, and unite the underground Church with the CCPA.
Thus there would be a single Catholic Church in China: seven illicitly-ordained bishops had their excommunication lifted, and the CCP would liaise with the Vatican on the appointment of bishops in the future. To many it seemed that the Sino-Vatican pact was made at the cost of the witness of the underground Catholics who had suffered for their loyalty to the Pope.
Certainly that is the position of Cardinal Joseph Zen, one of Chow’s predecessors as Bishop of Hong Kong and among the most respected members of the Sacred College. When he raised his concerns about the proposed deal between the Vatican and the CCP, however, he was ignored; when he sought an urgent audience with the Holy Father, he was rebuffed.
Lord Patten has called his treatment “lily-livered”. Most recently Cardinal Zen has been harassed and placed under arrest by the Chinese authorities; now in his nineties, he remains a marked man. Meanwhile in the appointment of new bishops the Sino-Vatican Pact has been repeatedly violated by the CCP, to no one’s surprise save their Vatican interlocutors.
Such is the CCP’s reach into the lives of ordinary people in China that it is difficult for outsiders to understand the reality of life for the underground Catholics there. We were fortunate, therefore, to be able to speak to a Chinese Catholic, John Paul.
At the moment John Paul lives and studies in the United States, and tweets about Chinese Catholic affairs. He is in regular contact with family and friends back home, and given the danger to which he opened himself up to by speaking to us, we assured him of anonymity.
We asked John Paul, in the first instance, to reflect on the leadership that Cardinal Zen has continued to provide in recent years, as a cardinal with an international reputation rather than as the sitting diocesan bishop in Hong Kong, from which office he retired in 2009. He spoke of Zen with love and deep reverence, citing what “Grandpa” (as he is affectionately known) said in 2019, when he received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.
“He said, ‘I am here to receive, gratefully, the medal; not in my honour, because I have almost paid nothing for my freedom, but for all those who suffered really for the freedom in China and in Hong Kong.’ But Grandpa has paid a price; he recently was arrested and put on trial. We’re all in danger; I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” John Paul is worried about his own future, naturally, but he has wider concerns as well.
“Above all,” he explains, “I’m worried about the moral hypocrisy and the potential collapse of the Universal Church.” Zen has raised similar concerns, most recently in his comments on the Synod on Synodality, which the Herald reported in October. But it’s clear that for John Paul there’s a concern that when China is rebuilding itself, no one will trust the Church.
Why should this be? John Paul’s frustration becomes immediately clear: “At a time when we desperately needed support, Rome betrayed us. Now on top of the Vatican’s silence about the systemic persecutions in China comes her loud promotion of sexual immorality which will lure my nation to the same path of western disorder.”
There is no room for ambiguity here, and he refers to the recent controversial letter from Chinese Catholics published by The Remnant, which (among other things) pleaded with the Holy Father to terminate the Sino-Vatican Pact and to re-excommunicate the bishops of the official church.
“The members of the official CCP-controlled church,” John Paul continues (which is to say the CCPA), “continue to entertain themselves in Pope Francis’s view that Chinese people can be both good Christians and good citizens at the same time. But the Holy Father doesn’t identify the regime as undemocratic. In fact, any real Christian who desires to become a patriotic citizen – rather than a pro-CCP subject – suffers greatly under Chinese dictatorship.”
“Meanwhile, the Q&A webpage of the Jesuit Beijing Center, perhaps the only congregational entity not ostracized by the CCP, assures American visiting students that ‘living in a communist country doesn’t necessarily feel very different from living in a country with a democratic political system.’ There are beautiful official churches, certainly, but they haven’t shone with the light of truth since the Communist takeover in 1949. We need the gospel truth, not President Xi’s Sinicized Catholicism. We need social doctrine that teaches unambiguously why Communism is the enemy of Christianity.”
Turning to dates and milestones, it’s obvious that John Paul thinks that persecution has increased, rather than decreased, since the Vatican struck its deal with China in 2018. The temptation to conform has been strong: “increasing number of underground priests – coerced by the CCP and encouraged by Rome – began to register with the government. Immediately they were permitted to preside at Masses and administer the sacraments in official churches.”
“But at the same time they also became vulnerable to state pressure, and so they may follow the order to ban summer-camp and children from entering into churches, or may compromise or distort their preaching on doctrine, morality and church-and-state relations. This is an inevitable reality no one can escape. This group is what I call the moderate underground, as opposed to the hardcore underground that refuses to surrender to the CCP at all.”
It’s an important distinction, and John Paul explains it in more detail. “The underground Catholics in general are rural, uneducated, and low in socioeconomic status. But those in the hardcore group share several unique things. They strongly identify with the post-1949 martyrs and they refuse to join the official church as a way of buttressing their heroic loyalty to the Holy See. They continue to circulate letters of Pius XII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI which condemned the regime and supported the persecuted, for encouragement.”
“They feel totally betrayed by the China-Vatican deal, to the extent that they deem the sacraments of the official church to be invalid. Because they refuse to attend official Masses and can only rarely find an unregistered priest – they call them ‘loyal priests’ – to say a clandestine Mass in a safe place, they have to receive the sacraments in spirit only. A few remaining ‘loyal priests’ say private Masses at home.”
“The hardcore group are also immersed in many devotional practices that might be seen as belonging to the pre-Vatican II era, although I don’t think there’s a general attachment to the Traditional Latin Mass. They take a conservative view of moral issues, and are horrified by the suggestion that the Church’s traditional social teachings may now be up for debate. They find it hard to believe that the Holy Father has allowed this interpretation to emerge.”
“Meanwhile, it’s also true that when it became clear that the hardcore group was facing extinction without new bishops chosen by Rome, some priests decided to ordain their own bishops without papal approval. Others joined the official church but denied it or hid it from their flock to avoid losing trust – and their income, because underground priests mainly rely on their Mass stipends. Internal divisions and chaos abound.”
With all these divisions, is it difficult to engage with different Chinese who identify as Catholics? John Paul explains quite how complicated it is, saying that “when official members and those support the secret-deal claim that ‘there is one church in China and it is the church of Jesus’, they accept their version of one church that has no freedom to preach her whole truth and to live out her moral, social and political teachings. Most tend to defend the CCP and don’t care at all about sweeping persecutions of those who speak truth or fight for their rights.”
“Meanwhile, when underground members and those who oppose the same secret-deal claim that “there is one church in China and it is the church of Jesus”, they accept the one Church that is orthodox and free to preach. Yet they are uneducated about democracy and civic life and they are hostile to Protestants.”
John Paul obtained permission from Cardinal Zen to turn his Chinese-version biography of John Paul II, which was banned from being published in China, into audio files. The text was also censored from appearing online, so he organised a Zoom book club to talk about the recordings. “I made a promotion flyer highlighting the Polish Pope’s three fighting strategies: memory battle, cultural resistance, conscience revolution,” he says. But it was an uphill struggle.
“Nuns, priests and lay faithful from both churches expressed interest, as well as some conservative and courageous house-church Protestants. But as we read on and added more historical and political context, most Catholics dropped out and even blocked me. They wanted to know about John Paul II’s emphasis on mercy but not on justice, and they refused to accept what his teachings had to expose about the deceptive nature of the CCP’s project of Sinicization and the dangers faced by the Vatican’s increasing friendliness towards it.”
John Paul also posted blog articles to promote underground heroism, but, as he explains, “my account was permanently shut down three days after I borrowed a brave man’s cellphone to register another one. I suspect that I was reported to the authorities by members of the official church. And yet their flattery of Pope Francis and President Xi’s arrangement since 2018 has no problem of dissemination.”
Human stories, inevitably, come to the fore. One stands out among the rest: that of Xavier, also in his nineties like Cardinal Zen. “He is the last powerful witness of many martyrs,” says John Paul. A former seminarian, Xavier was arrested in the days of Cardinal Kung when the CCP cracked down on Shanghai in 1955. Three decades later he found himself back at the seminary, teaching English and Gregorian chant.
“After 30 years of persecution, things began to revive,” Xavier told John Paul. “Many loyal sons and daughters who could walk out of the labour camps returned to their hometowns and parishes. Priests were busy offering Mass, administering the sacraments and preaching from home to home; churches were being reclaimed and reconstructed. As it happens the old Latin Mass was well preserved, because China had been sealed to the world since 1949.”
There has been much distress and anger among those who have kept the flame of faith alive in China; much of it is directed towards Pope Francis. In the face of this, Cardinal Zen has urged prudence. “Don’t rebel; calm down,” he has told the underground Church. “I know you are angry. You’ve been loyal to the Holy See and the Pope and for this you suffered for decades. Now the Vatican says ‘you are wrong, move out of the underground’.
“You are indeed betrayed,” he has told them. “But I can only say this to you: don’t begin a revolution. If they take away your church, if you can’t exercise your duties? Go home, pray with your family, loosen the soil and wait for a better time. Return to the catacombs: Communism is not forever.”
Cardinal Zen knows the cost: “many friends in prison in Hong Kong are waiting for me to visit,” he has said. Like the leaders of the early Church he tells his people not to seek martyrdom – “don’t make unnecessary sacrifices” – but he is willing to live up to his red robes, which are historically and intentionally the colour of martyrdom: “I will make my own sacrifice with joy, if God wills. My job is not to be docile; my job is to speak the truth.”
What message does John Paul have for Catholics in the west, far away from the reality of the difficulties on the ground in China? He references Cardinal Zen’s letter to the members of the Sacred College from 2019, in which he asked: “Can we passively witness this killing of the Church in China on the part of those who should be protecting and defending it from its enemies?” He implored his brother cardinals to act: “I am begging you on my knees.”
“I join Grandpa on my knees”, John Paul says. “I beg you; do not kowtow to this evil.”
Photo: (c) Lu Nan/Magnum Photos.
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