(Slate.fr November 24 2018)
Li Ruohan, the pseudonym of a writer from northern China, has compared the September 2018 provisional agreement between the Vatican and the PRC with the 1801 Concordat between the Vatican and Napoleon Bonaparte, finding striking similarities–all of them to the detriment to the dignity and independence to the Church: both validate the restructuring of dioceses by the state; both give the state control over religious activities, allowing merely formal recognition of the powers of the Pope; both work to the advantage of clergy that had previously cooperated with the state over those who had resisted the state’s attempts to subjugate and replace the Church.
There are similarities: but Chinese Catholics might be wishing that the agreement resembled the Napoleonic Concordat more closely. Continue reading Chinese Catholicism: The Predicament of the Underground Church
The Taiwan website Storm Media has offered a rationale of sorts for Pope Francis’s “provisional agreement” with the Chinese government on the status of the Catholic Church in China: