Pope Francis has an outstanding wish. How far will the Vatican go to deliver it?

Beijing: As China’s Catholics flock to Easter Sunday Mass, the recuperating Pope Francis will be in many of their prayers, but their great hope of seeing him visit their country remains a distant prospect for now.

The 88-year-old Pontiff, who is slowly recovering from a life-threatening bout of pneumonia, has never set foot in China. No pope has. And Francis likely never will, despite having done more than his predecessors to forge ties with the Chinese Communist Party, while incurring the friendly fire of critical Catholics.

Acolytes lead a procession during a Holy Saturday Mass on the evening before Easter at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a government-sanctioned Catholic Church in Beijing.Credit: AP/File

As recently as September, as he wrapped up a whirlwind four-nation tour of Asia, Francis repeated his outstanding wish – one he first expressed in 2014 and restated many times since. “I would like to visit China. It’s a great country, and I admire and respect China,” Francis told reporters on a flight home to Rome from Singapore. “I believe China is a promise and a hope for the church.”

His failure to secure an invitation from the Chinese government hasn’t dampened the prayers of the faithful.

“We are concerned very much,” says Mrs Xiao, aged in her 50s, reflecting on the Pope’s poor health this year as she arrived for Sunday Mass at Beijing’s Xishiku Cathedral at the start of Lent. “We pray for him every day.”

On a pilgrimage to the Vatican a decade ago, Xiao stood metres from Francis in Saint Peter’s Square as he walked through the crowds greeting the faithful – an experience she likened to witnessing “the love of Jesus”.

The state-sanctioned Xishiku Church in Beijing, flanked by Chinese pagodas and lion statues, is an example of President Xi Jinping’s ‘sinicisation’ agenda to fuse religion with Chinese culture. Credit: Sanghee Liu

But she hesitates to answer when asked if she thinks it possible the Pope or his successor will visit China in her lifetime, noting the sensitivity of the topic as she makes a polite exit in the direction of cathedral doors.

“How wonderful it would be, but it is unlikely,” says her brother, Mr Xiao, adding: “I dare not to comment on it.”

Faith can be a fraught and inherently political topic in China. It is wedged at the juncture of CCP ideology, which is atheist and bans its 100 million members from holding religious beliefs, and the Chinese state which formally recognises and tightly regulates five religions: Catholicism, Protestantism, Daoism, Islam and Buddhism.

When it comes to Catholicism, the Pope’s status as the supreme moral authority for China’s approximately 10 million Catholics represents a particular challenge for the Chinese leadership and President Xi Jinping, who has asserted the supremacy of the party over all sectors of life in China.

During his four-country Asia tour last September Pope Francis made clear his desire to visit China.Credit: AP

But the question of the Pope’s China aspirations may hinge less on the power dynamics between Beijing and the Vatican, and more on Xi’s willingness to make a crude political play in service of his overarching ambition – to weaken American dominance and strengthen China’s influence at the apex of the global system.

A visit by the Pope would hand Beijing the imprimatur of one of the world’s leading moral figures to use in its defence against the US-led alliance’s claims of China’s human rights abuses, particularly against persecuted Muslim Uyghur groups.

“Welcoming the Pope to China will be a very much a public relations coup for China, which has tensions with so many nations,” says Dr Kim-Kwong Chan, a retired pastor and longtime scholar of Christianity in China.

“They will be able to say, ‘Look even the Pope comes to China, so China seems to be quite well accepted by this moral religious figure of the world’.”

Dr Michel Chambon says the Vatican sees China as a powerful global actor who it should be fostering closer ties with for its own soft power ambitions, particularly at a time when collaboration with Washington has become more strained under US President Donald Trump.

“The Pope going to China will be a slap in the face of Washington,” says Chambon, a Catholic theologian at the National University of Singapore.

“We don’t just give the Pope for free. We try to negotiate,” he says. Dispatching the Pope overseas usually involves a push by the Vatican to improve the situation for Catholics in the host country, or to seek its support for global humanitarian issues.

Chambon doesn’t think the Pope will be boarding a plane to Beijing any time soon, but says China hasn’t shut the door on the idea either.

For the Chinese side, getting the Holy See to abandon its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that China regards as its own territory, is a prize Beijing is likely to pursue in future negotiations.

Parishioners get ready for mass at the Xishiku Church in Beijing.Credit: Sanghee Liu

The Vatican – which is on a shrinking list of 12 states to have formal ties with Taipei, and the only one in Europe – has been open about its desire to establish a permanent office in China, and some experts believe it would make the diplomatic conversion if it secured the church’s inroads to Beijing.

“The Vatican has few cards in its hand, and it plays them very carefully. Taiwan is clearly one card,” Chambon says.

The Pope’s overtures to Beijing have come as part of the Vatican’s controversial pursuit of a rapprochement with the Chinese leadership. This resulted in a landmark provisional accord struck in 2018 that sought to break a decades-long feud over who should have the authority to appoint Catholic bishops in China by setting out a process of joint recognition.

The accord also served a mutual aim in seeking to resolve a split in the Catholic Church in China. For decades, it has been divided between the state-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association churches, monitored by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, and so-called underground churches that rejected the government’s interference and professed loyalty to the Pope, risking persecution from authorities.

A wax statue of the Chinese Holy Mother and son in Manchurian dress from the Qing dynasty era inside the Xishiku Church in Beijing. Credit: Sanghee Liu

“The Vatican wanted to have a unified church operating in the open, and the Chinese also wanted to have also something out in the open under their observation and their monitoring systems,” says Chan.

The terms of the agreement, which has been renewed three times, most recently in 2024 for four years, have never been fully disclosed. The Vatican has said it gives the Pope final decision-making power over appointments of new bishops and, in return, it has recognised illegitimate bishops appointed by Beijing without papal approval. But the terms were breached when the Chinese made a number of unilateral appointments in 2022 and 2023, forcing the Pope to retrospectively ratify them for the “greater good”.

For the legions of critics in both China and the West, the accord surrendered too much control over religious freedom to Chinese authorities and came at the expense of buying the Pope’s muted criticism of human rights abuses, including the persecution of Uyghur muslim minority groups.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former archbishop of Hong Kong, denounced the deal as an “incredible betrayal”. When Zen was arrested by Hong Kong authorities in 2022 for aiding pro-democracy activists during Beijing’s national security crackdown, critics noted the Pope’s silence.

The Beijing Catholic community mark the beginning of the Lent period with ash crosses for a service at Xishiku Cathedral. Credit: Sanghee Liu

“Some people thought the underground church had suffered the most and then was thrown under the bus ... and that the Vatican were playing right into the hands of the government,” says Father Paul Marani, an expert in Christianity in China at Santa Clara University.

Francis has consecrated 10 bishops since the 2018 accord, and today most Catholic churches in China are part of the state-sanctioned system. However, as many as 10 bishops who refused to sign up to the Vatican-China deal have faced indefinite detention, disappearances, police investigations, threats, surveillance, and interrogation, a report by the Hudson Institute think tank found.

For its part, the Vatican has conceded the accord was not the “best deal possible” but the best one it could get. There are no signs, however, that it has moved the dial on the Pope’s China tour aspirations.

“It does not seem to me that, so far, there are the conditions for this wish of the Pope to come to fruition,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State and a key architect of the accord, said last year.

The Xishiku Cathedral, one of the oldest and grandest churches in Beijing, is state-sanctioned. It bares the tell-tale embellishments of Xi’s “sinicisation of religion” campaign, which seeks to assimilate religions with Chinese culture while ensuring conformity with CCP ideology.

The cathedral’s ornate gothic towers are framed by traditional red Chinese pagodas, which sit either side of the building, and two large stone lion statues flank the steps leading to the entry – a striking visual metaphor for Catholicism wedged between Chinese culture.

Inside, the religious iconography bears a distinctive Chinese flourish. A wax statue of the Holy Mother and Son depicts a Chinese Mary and Jesus styled in Manchurian clothes of the Qing dynasty.

How deeply Xi’s sinicisation agenda has been incorporated into Catholic services and religious teachings across China is unclear, though state-issued regulations in 2021 called for clergy to “love the motherland”, “support the CCP leadership” and promote sinicisation through their sermons. The policy has added to the alarm shared by Francis’ critics who accuse him of selling out to the CCP.

Supporters of the Vatican’s approach say it is grounded in a pragmatic reality that Chinese state control reaches into all aspects of citizens lives and working within the system affords Catholics a relative degree of freedom to practise their faith.

With Sunday’s mass due to start in a few minutes, Mr Zhang, 57, has paused in prayer before a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral’s forecourt. A devout believer, he traces his family’s Catholic roots back more than 100 years on both his father and mother’s sides.

He is confident he will be the first of his family’s generation to see the Pope set foot in China. “I will witness it. This is a hope of all Catholics in China. It will happen. We firmly believe this,” says Zhang, a manager of a government social welfare organisation. “The Pope is becoming more open, more inclusive. We [China] will further open up, too.”

The China dream is unlikely to die with Francis. The Vatican, a shrewd political operation that has honed the art of calculated diplomacy over centuries, is hedging its bets on the shifting epicentre of global power towards a rising China.

“The next pope may not be as gifted or confident with Chinese or Asian situations, but it’s going to remain a priority,” says Chambon. “The next election [for pope] will be probably the first time that, when they select candidates, they will check his view on China. It will be a key criteria that he has a subtle, constructive view on how to engage China.”

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