China Politics and Religion – WATER FLOWING EAST

Chinese Catholicism: The Predicament of the Underground Church

Jinping Pankrator
(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

Frank and Nick: Is the Provisional Agreement a Really Shrewd Move?

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: “Toward China, ‘A Daring Advance to the East,’ with a Deliberate Choice to Remain Silent: Is Pope Francis a ‘Cold Machiavellian’?” (December 23 2018). Continue reading Frank and Nick: Is the Provisional Agreement a Really Shrewd Move?

The Provisional Agreement, a Month or So Later

The New York Times has published an extended critique by Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun (陳日君—Mandarin pronunciation: Chen Rijun), Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, of the September provisional agreement between the Vatican and Beijing, whereby the Vatican agrees to recognize those Chinese bishops appointed by the political authorities (via the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association), and the political authorities in turn allow the Pope a veto over the appointment of future bishops. Zen asserts that the Pope has been fooled both by the Chinese authorities and by his own bureaucracy. The Pope is an Argentine and all of his life has seen communists as the oppressed. He does not understand that when they gain power they become the oppressors. The Pope desires that the official and underground communities in China come together again, but the consequence will be “the annihilation of the real church in China.” “If I were a cartoonist,” Zen says, “I would draw the Holy Father on his knees offering the keys of the kingdom of heaven to President Xi Jinping and saying, ‘Please recognize me as the pope.’”

Continue reading The Provisional Agreement, a Month or So Later