For the estimated 12 million “underground” Catholics in China the Pope’s interview with Asia Times last week must have stuck in the craw. “For me, China has always been a reference point of greatness,” Francis said. “A great country. But more than a great country, a great culture, with an inexhaustible wisdom.” The Catholic Church owes it respect “with a capital R”, the Pope said.
What was striking about the interview was what Pope Francis failed to mention. He did not refer to the two Catholic bishops and seven priests currently in prison in the country. Neither did he mention the 1,000 or so Protestants jailed for “unauthorised” religious activity. Or the continued state efforts to control Catholicism through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. Or the removal of 1,200 crosses in Zhejiang province, or the hundreds of churches demolished in the past two years, which have seen anti-Christian persecution return to levels not seen since the days of Mao.
But according to Fr Jeroom Heyndrickx, founding director of the Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation at Leuven Catholic University, which promotes cooperation with China, the Pope’s gentle approach is already making a difference. Last year, he wrote, new bishops for Zhouzhi and Anyang dioceses were installed after approval from the Vatican as well as Beijing. This followed three separate rounds of negotiations and ended a three-year freeze on episcopal ordinations.
These negotiations, said Fr Heyndrickx, led to a “positive atmosphere between Beijing and Rome that we have not seen in decades”. The Pope’s latest comments will strengthen this relationship further, he argued. “Friends in China – Catholics as well as non-Catholics – feel confirmed and encouraged by this friendly attitude of the Pope toward their country, culture and people,” he wrote.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the outspoken prelate of Hong Kong who has been a thorn in the Communist Party’s side for many years, has a different view. He compares the Vatican’s softly-softly approach to Joseph begging for dialogue with Herod. “If the Church gives in to pressure from the government, the only result – despite proclamations to the contrary – is that it will have sold out the pontifical right to appoint bishops,” he wrote last month. Critics are likely to compare the Vatican efforts with China to Paul VI’s unsuccessful attempts to reach out to the Soviet Union during the Cold War – his Ostpolitik.
Surely it would be better, they say, to follow the line of St John Paul II, whose defiance served as a catalyst for the collapse of communism. A speech last year by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, was seen by some as an attack on this more combative approach. He said: “In choosing candidates for the episcopate, we choose shepherds and not people who systematically oppose the regime, people who behave like gladiators, people who love to grandstand on the political stage.” For Cardinal Zen, the remarks implied criticism of many of the great cardinals of the era who suffered torture and worse for standing up to communism. “Who had he in mind while making this description?” he asked. “I fear that he was thinking of a Cardinal Wyszyński, a Cardinal Mindszenty, a Cardinal Beran. But these are the heroes who bravely defended the faith of their people! It terrifies me to [see] this mindset.”
Yet, as John Allen pointed out at Crux, the Vatican has always followed a model of “respectful engagement” with the Chinese regime, reaching back at least to 1966 when Pope Paul VI sent a New Year’s greeting to Chairman Mao without mentioning the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution. “The calculus in Rome has always been that an overt challenge to China over its treatment of religious minorities might only make things worse,” he wrote. Whether Pope Francis’s efforts to thaw relations are successful should become apparent in the next year as China and the Holy See struggle to agree a way to appoint new bishops.
Yet recent history suggests there is plenty of reason to be pessimistic. Back in 2005 Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, the Vatican’s foreign minister, said there were “no insurmountable problems” to restoring diplomatic relations, which were severed in 1951. A decade later that now seems hopelessly optimistic. And if China fails to soften its line on bishops, and the Pope’s gamble proves fruitless, then he may have nothing left to try. Then Vatican officials may wish they had listened to Cardinal Zen.
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