Pope Xi

National Review ^ | November 9, 2023 | Nina Shea

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Pope Xi

How the Vatican capitulated to the Chinese Communist Party

The Holy See’s 2018 provisional agreement with Beijing is failing, but the problems with the Vatican’s China policy did not begin five years ago. They stem from the 1980s, when the Holy See began pursuing dialogue with the Chinese Communist Party. The Vatican has capitulated more and more to keep that dialogue alive.

The capitulation has accelerated during Pope Francis’s papacy and under Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin. Pope Benedict XVI, in a 2007 letter laying out fundamental principles for China’s Catholic Church, called the Beijing regime’s unilateral appointment of Catholic bishops “one of the most delicate problems” in Vatican–Sino relations. The provisional agreement was supposed to begin to solve it.

Five years after the signing of the agreement, though, the Chinese government continues to appoint bishops on its own. Pope Francis began giving his after-the-fact blessing to these appointments and over the past two years has done so routinely. No deal with Beijing was needed to obtain this result, but Vatican diplomats present it as a “remarkable” achievement in the long quest for “communion” with and “unity” among China’s bishops. They forget that the strategy undermines the pope’s “supreme spiritual authority,” as Benedict called it, to appoint bishops by delegating it de facto to a repressive atheist regime.

The Vatican adopted its policy of pursuing dialogue to counter Communist Party efforts to sever the Chinese Catholic Church’s ties to the Holy See. Those CCP efforts began in 1951 with the expulsion from Beijing of papal nuncio Antonio Riberi, his entire diplomatic staff, and foreign Catholic clergy.

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