Vatican-China deal panders to atheist regime

The impending deal between the Vatican and China’s atheist Communist regime is no surprise.

Bolivian President Evo Morales hands Pope Francis crucified Christ nailed to a hammer and sickle in July 2015. Picture: Twitter

Unthinkable as it would have been under previous popes, especially John Paul II, the impending deal between the Vatican and China, ceding authority to the atheist communist regime over the appointment of bishops, is no surprise.

It comes as watchdog groups warn that the persecution of Christians and other minorities in China is at its most intense since the Cultural Revolution, with hundreds of thousands of arrests, the destruction of churches and the confiscation of bibles.

After a century as an implacable enemy of communism, a stand that saw millions tortured and martyred in Russia, China and their satellite states, the signs were clear in 2015 that Pope Francis was taking the Catholic Church in a different direction.

His smiling acceptance of a crucifix from Bolivia’s socialist President Evo Morales, featuring the crucified Christ nailed to a hammer and sickle — the symbol of tyranny — shocked some of his flock to the bone. “The height of arrogance is to manipulate God for the service of atheist ideologies,” Spanish bishop Jose Ignacio Munilla tweeted at the time. In February this year, Argentinian bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Science and one of Francis’s closest confidants, claimed China was the best example of a Catholic society. It had a “positive national conscience”, he claimed, praising it for “best implementing the social doctrine of the church”.

By then, negotiations between the Vatican and China were moving towards rapprochement.

The Wall Street Journal reports the controversial new deal will give China and the Vatican a say in appointing bishops. Beijing will recognise the Pope as the head of the Catholic Church in China, with limited power to veto appointments. In return, Francis, would recognise seven excommunicated Chinese bishops, appointed without Vatican approval.

One of these, Huang Bingzhang, has served in the National People’s Congress — a rubber stamp for President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party — since 1988. He was excommunicated in 2011, under Benedict XVI.

Huang is the leader of the Patriotic Association, established under Mao Zedong in 1957 as a substitute for Catholicism while the church’s leaders and adherents were driven underground.

John Paul II created at least one Chinese cardinal “in pectore’’ (close to his heart, in secret) in 1979 — the underground bishop of Shanghai, Ignatius Kung. After Kung was released from house arrest in 1985 he travelled to Rome, where he received a six-minute standing ovation in St Peter’s Square.

The new deal has been praised by Francesco Sisci, an Italian teacher of international relations at China Renmin University in Beijing. “It is a baby step by China toward recognising some of the framework of the Western world,” he said. “It doesn’t go as far as recognising what we in the West call religious freedom, but it is a degree of religious autonomy.”

Vatican journalist Sandro Magister disagreed: “This is a strange step backward on terrain over which the church has fought, not for centuries but millennia. The church has managed to free itself from control of sovereigns and governments on ecclesiastical matters but now this achievement is clamorously contradicted by the agreement with China.”

Xi has launched a program to “Sinicize” all religions to ensure they do not contradict the Communist Party.