There’s No Time to Meet with Francis. China Already Has Its Pope, Xi

L'Espresso ^ | Sandro Magister

[ebb tide]

There’s No Time to Meet with Francis. China Already Has Its Pope, Xi

After the botched and fruitless meeting in Kazakhstan with Moscow patriarch Kirill, Francis also failed to meet in Nur-Sultan, now once again called Astana, with Chinese president Xi Jinping, on a state visit to the Kazakh capital that same day, Wednesday September 14, on which the pope reaffirmed the “primary and inalienable” right to religious freedom, which is not only interior or devotional but must also include “the right of every person to bear public witness to his beliefs,” just the opposite of what happens in China.

The meeting with Xi had been requested days before by the Vatican – as revealed by “Reuters” – but the reply from the Chinese side had been that there was no time for it. And already on the departure flight from Rome to Kazakhstan, Francis had said he hadn’t heard anything else.

But then, during the press conference on the flight back to Rome (see photo), the pope again spoke at length about China, prompted by a question from Elise Ann Allen of “Crux,” who reminded him that the trial of Cardinal Zen Zekiun was set to begin in Hong Kong and asked him if he considered this trial “a violation of religious freedom.”

The official transcript of Pope Francis’s response is worth reading in its entirety, in its stammering, reticence, strangeness, because it is an exemplary distillation of his approach to China:

“To understand China takes a century, and we do not live for a century. The Chinese mentality is a rich mentality, and when it gets a bit sick it loses its richness, it is capable of making mistakes. To understand, we have chosen the path of dialogue, open to dialogue. There is a bilateral Vatican-Chinese commission that is going well, slowly, because the Chinese pace is slow, they have an eternity to move forward: it is a people of infinite patience. But from prior experience – let’s think of the Italian missionaries who went there and who were respected as scholars; let’s think, even today, of many priests or believing people who have been called in by the Chinese university because this enhances the culture – it is not easy to understand the Chinese mentality, but it must be respected, I always respect. And here at the Vatican there is a dialogue commission that is going well. Cardinal Parolin presides over it and at this moment he is the man who best knows China and Chinese dialogue. It is a slow thing, but there are always steps forward. To characterize China as antidemocratic, I don’t feel like it, because it is such a complex country, with its own rhythms… Yes, it is true that there are things that seem to us not to be democratic, this is true. Cardinal Zen, elderly, will go on trial in a few days, I believe. He says what he feels, one sees that there are limitations there. Rather than characterizing, because it is difficult, and I don’t feel like characterizing, there are impressions; rather than characterizing, I try to support the path of dialogue. Then in dialogue many things are clarified, and not only of the Church, also of other sectors. For example, the extent of China: the governors of the provinces are all different, there are different cultures within China. It is a giant, understanding China is a gigantic thing. We must not lose patience, we need, we need a lot, but we must go with dialogue. I try to refrain from characterizing it because, yes, it may be, but let’s move forward.”

This “summa” of Francis’s thought on China is striking for the iciness he reserves for Cardinal Zen, whom he implicitly accuses of imprudence in violating the “limitations” that would advise him to keep quiet.

Striking is his complete silence on the many bishops under arrest, on the persecutions hitting so many Catholics, and on the state control suffocating the entire life of the Chinese Church.

Striking is his refusal to judge China as “antidemocratic,” moreover a few days after the publication, on August 31, of the report of the United Nations high commission for human rights on the systematic oppression of the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region on the border with Kazakhstan.

This alone is enough to point out the abysmal distance between the lofty words spoken by the pope in defense of religious freedom on September 14 in Nur-Sultan, in front of the audience of the “7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions,” and his exoneration of the Chinese regime, where at most – he said – “there are things that seem to us not to be democratic,” in any case not such as to indict it as a whole.

But in the name of what does Francis feel obliged to treat China with this boundless complacency? In the name of “dialogue,” he says. That is, in concrete terms, the “provisional and secret” agreement signed between the Vatican and Beijing in October of 2018, renewed for two years in 2020 and now close to being renewed a second time.

This agreement, which is thought to assign the selection of every new bishop to the Chinese authorities through churchlike agencies under their complete control, with the pope having the faculty of accepting or rejecting the appointee, has so far produced very disappointing results.

In four years, only four appointments have been made under the agreement, the last of which – of Francis Cui Qingqi in Wuhan – came more than a year ago. Nothing in comparison with the 36 dioceses that still remain  uncovered, out of the total of 98 dioceses in the whole of China, reduced in number and with borders redrawn by the Beijing government without the consent of the Holy See.

The negotiations for the renewal of the agreement were hosted at the end of August and the beginning of September in Tianjin, with Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli at the head of the Vatican delegation. And on the occasion the Chinese authorities kindly allowed the members of the delegation to visit the local bishop emeritus, Melchior Shi Hongzhen, even though he is “clandestine,” or not recognized by the government because of his tenacious refusal to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the regime’s main instrument of control over the Church, and for this reason repeatedly put under house arrest.

But the moving meeting with this venerable old man – to whom Celli gave a pectoral cross in the name of the pope – was also revealing of how far the agreement on the appointment of bishops is from producing appreciable results. Shi Hongzhen is 93 years old and since 2019, after the death of the last incumbent of the diocese, Stephen Li Side, he too “clandestine,” has remained the only bishop alive in Tianjin. This is because the much younger priest Yang Wangwan, whom Rome is thought to have wanted to put at the head of the diocese since before the 2018 agreement, was not accepted by the Chinese regime. And he is still not today, so much so that not only has he not been made a bishop, but the diocese of Tianjin did not even include him in its delegation to the important National Assembly of Chinese Catholics held in August in Wuhan.

This assembly, the tenth in a series inaugurated in 1957 with the Maoist era in full swing, is a sort of congress of the official bodies of the Chinese Catholic Church controlled by the communist party. Its task is to give the marching orders and assign executive positions. 345 delegates from the 28 administrative subdivisions of the country took part in it.

Well then, both the official speeches and the names of the new leaders showed the absolute dominance of the Chinese regime in governing the Church, through the men most submissive to it.

Now at the head of the Patriotic Association is Beijing archbishop Joseph Li Shan. The new president of the Council of Chinese Bishops – the episcopal pseudoconference never recognized by Rome due to the absence of “clandestine” bishops from it – is Joseph Shen Bin, bishop of Haimen, 52, who was also entrusted with the keynote address of the assembly. In addition, a “supervisory committee of the two supreme bodies” was created, with president Vincent Shan Silu, one of the seven bishops unilaterally installed years ago by the regime, and as a result excommunicated, whom Pope Francis had pardoned in 2018 upon the signing of the agreement, in deference to the wishes of Beijing.

Presiding over the inaugural session of the assembly, on August 18, was Joseph Guo Jincai, ordinary of Chengde, another of the seven bishops excommunicated and then pardoned by the pope. But the most cumbersome presence, on all three days of the assembly, was that of Cui Maohu, a party official very close to Xi Jinping, since the beginning of this year director of the state office for religious affairs.

All in view of the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party scheduled for October 16, which should irreversibly strengthen the power of Xi, now on a par with only Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in the Olympus of Communist China.

In this phase of absolutism driven to the extreme and international hegemonic ambitions, it therefore comes as no surprise that negotiations with the Holy See should be of irrelevant significance for Beijing. To the point that in the three days of the Wuhan assembly neither Xi’s man, Cui Maohu, nor the new star of the bishops, Shen Bin, in his detailed report on the life of the Catholic Church in China – published in full on the official website chinacatholic.cn – said a single word on the 2018 agreement with the Vatican.

Nor did they name Pope Francis even once, in pages and pages of unbridled praise of the only true material and spiritual guide of the Chinese nation and Catholic Church, Xi.

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Condividi:

[ebb tide]

Ping

[GrumpyOldGuy]

No reason to meet with that fraud anyway. ANTI-Pope.

[JJBookman]

...EXACTLY!