We must have a lot of patience with the Chinese …. The measured words of the Vatican diplomat hardly veil the irritation of the Holy See at the way in which the Beijing authorities are interpreting, euphemism for not applying, the renewed secret agreement for a two years last autumn. The text was never made known at the behest of China. We only know that it should serve to agree on the appointment of bishops. In the shadow of this agreement, however, stipulated for the first time in 2018, the Chinese Communist Party is implementing a policy of repression of religious freedom that aims to reassert its power.
Pope Francis had decided to put his foot in the door of a country that is closing, as was said by the Vatican negotiators, convinced that in the long run he would allow Catholicism to regain its roots; and that in the medium term it would have made it possible to establish diplomatic relations with the Xi Jinping regime. The last few months, however, outline different scenarios. For some time the Vatican has been asking to be able to open an informal office in Beijing: a couple of rooms to closely monitor what is happening, starting with the application of the temporary agreement. But the request was dropped.
The Chinese authorities have pointed out that the Apostolic Legation already exists in Hong Kong; and that it could be closed overnight if it were somehow suspected of supporting protests in the former British colony: the recent security law allows it to be equated with an attack on national security. In recent months, some Catholic exponents in publishing and politics have been intimidated or arrested. It is played on the principle of “foreign interference”. The no to the opening of one of our offices in Beijing, they explain to the Vatican Secretariat of State, says how distant diplomatic relations are between us and them.
On the other hand, it is not an isolated signal. The Communist Party wants to be the master of the religious question. For this reason the orphanages run by the nuns are closed. Yet they have a long tradition. In past decades, mothers brought their newborn girls there at the time of the one-child policy, they say in the Vatican, to prevent them from being killed. Especially in peasant communities they were considered only one more mouth to feed. As for the tightening of checks in recent months, parents cannot go to church with the children: you must be eighteen years old. The police stop families outside, and undertake to keep their sons or daughters until the mass is over: a dreaded practice.
There is talk of digital cameras installed inside religious places to register the faithful. Asia News, the magazine of PIME missionaries, has just published an article by the director Bernardo Cervellera. Title: A fine for the underground bishop’s mass. The Sino-Vatican Agreement betrayed. There is talk of a faithful being fined for hosting Monsignor Shao Zhumin in his private chapel. The prelate, it says, recognized by the Holy See but not by the Party, branded as an emissary of a “foreign institution”. And the fault of those who made him say the mass would be to have facilitated illegal religious activities.
Cervellera, director of Asianews from 2003, he will leave in mid-May: in his place will be Father Mario Ghezzi, director of PIME in Milan, where the editorial staff will move. was destined for Hong Kong, after a stop in Taiwan where he will take Mandarin lessons to refine his Chinese. And it will be interesting to see if and how much he can still write about China. His articles have always been considered too hostile to the regime. He also had disagreements and tensions on this with the Secretariat of State and the Vatican negotiators, who consider him to be in harmony with Cardinal Zen, an irreducible critic of the agreement wanted by Francis and his prime minister, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
The missionary among those who see the secret pact with Beijing as a Chinese picklock to erase the underground church loyal to the Pope; and who considers it unlikely that the agreements will survive beyond the threshold of the current pontificate. In reality, what is happening rather confirms a situation in the balance, and pro and anti-Chinese parties present within the Catholic Church. With an added element of uncertainty, due to the arrival of Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. His presidency could pose more problems to the Holy See than his predecessor, Donald Trump, created in relations with China.
The crudeness of his administration was seen when the Trumpian secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, attacked the Vatican head-on for the secret agreement, effectively forcing it to renew it so as not to appear subordinate to the United States. But now, with Biden’s strategic and subtle insistence on religious freedom and systematically violated human rights in China, be it Christians or Muslims, the Holy See’s position becomes less easy. Relations between Francis and the US president appear more cordial and convergent than Trump. But the situation has been reversed.
Now, the problem for the Catholic authorities no longer seems to be that of not aligning with the anti-Chinese strategy of the White House, required of the whole West and of its Asian allies. If anything, it becomes that of not appearing subordinate or in any case too compliant towards Beijing: an exercise of balance that promises to require a further effort of patience towards an assertive, nervous and tempted China to unload outside, perhaps even on relations with the Vatican , his domestic problems. For the Communist Party, it has always been a question used instrumentally in the internal ideological conflict.
April 29, 2021 (change April 29, 2021 | 00:19)
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