George Weigel in The Wall Street Journal warns the Vatican against its collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party – which fiercely persecutes religious belief. He reminds them that the Warsaw Pact secret intelligence services used similar Ostpolitik to deepen their penetration of ecclesial institutions and the Vatican itself.
Chairman Xi Gets a Seat at the Pope’s Table
Two Chinese bishops bent on ‘Sinicizing’ the Catholic Church attend the synod.
Wall Street Journal George Weigel Oct. 17, 2024 Rome
Of the 368 participants in this month’s Synod on Synodality, 272 are bishops. They are a remarkable cross-section of humanity, demonstrating that the Catholic Church is the most multicultural religious community in the world. Amid that diversity, two attendees stand out in a singular way: Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu of the Diocese of Funing/Mindong and Bishop Joseph Yang Yongqiang of the Diocese of Hangzhou hail from China, where an often brutal effort is under way to “Sinicize” religious communities, bringing them into conformity with “Xi Jinping Thought.”
The Chinese regime assigned Bishop Zhan Silu to his diocese in 2000. The bishop incurred excommunication for accepting consecration as a bishop without papal approval, a grave ecclesiastical crime. He was subsequently reconciled to the church in 2018 but a year later publicly vowed “to carry out the Sinicization of religion with determination” and “continue to follow a path that conforms to socialist society.”
Bishop Yang Yongqiang is vice president of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a tool of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, created in 1957 to split the Catholic Church. The Vatican has never recognized the group as a legitimate Catholic organ. In a letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI said its purposes are “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” Bishop Yang’s position in the CCPA further deepens the gulf between the regime-controlled church in China and the sorely beset underground church, which has remained loyal to Rome even as its clergy and laity are jailed or martyred.
Why, then, are these two men, whose ultimate loyalties are unclear, spending October in Rome at the personal invitation of Pope Francis? The modern history of Vatican diplomacy suggests an answer.
Senior Vatican diplomats have long been obsessed with achieving full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and China. Their strategic template for this effort is the church’s Ostpolitik of the late 1960s and 1970s. That policy sought an accommodation with communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe to find the church a modus non moriendi, a “way of not dying,” until those regimes liberalized to the point at which religious tolerance, if not full religious freedom, became the norm.
By any serious measure, the policy was an abject failure. During the Ostpolitik, persecution behind the Iron Curtain often intensified. Catholics who stood firm for religious freedom and other basic human rights felt betrayed by the Vatican. Warsaw Pact secret intelligence services used the Ostpolitik to deepen their penetration of ecclesial institutions and the Vatican itself.
On his election in 1978, Pope John Paul II quietly buried the Ostpolitik and made the papacy a vocal advocate of human rights, with considerable effect in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Soviet-occupied Lithuania.
The manifest failures of the Ostpolitik might have caused sober rethinking in the Vatican secretariat of state, but there is a Bourbon quality to that bureaucracy: Nothing is forgotten and nothing is learned. Thus young Vatican diplomats in training today at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy are taught that the policy was a great success, the apogee of 20th-century Vatican diplomacy. That cast of mind, plus the global inexperience of Pope Francis at his election in 2013, goes a long way to explaining why Bishops Zhan and Yang are attending the synod.
In 2018, Pope Francis, who seems blithely unconcerned about Mr. Xi’s “Sinicization” project, approved the deal that China-obsessed Vatican diplomats had long sought. The text of that arrangement, reaffirmed in 2021 and likely to be reaffirmed again soon, has never been made public. It is well-known, however, that the agreement gives Beijing a strong voice in the nomination of Catholic bishops in China: a concession that ignores the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and that flatly violates the Code of Canon Law, which states that “no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation or designation of Bishops are conceded to civil authorities.”
John Paul II and Benedict XVI could have made such a deal. Neither did, because they knew that it would compromise the church’s independence and that a totalitarian regime couldn’t be trusted. Francis, it seems, agreed to it because his diplomats persuaded him that cutting that deal—and later welcoming men like Bishops Zhan and Yang into the synodal fold—was a step toward full diplomatic relations. That, in turn, would give Vatican diplomacy a place at the table in discussions about the world’s future with a potential global hegemon.
Why that hegemon would pay attention to those who had kowtowed to it is a question never answered. Meantime, the pursuit of this diplomatic fantasy has muted the Vatican’s voice on behalf of all persecuted believers in China, in defense of Jimmy Lai, a devout Catholic, and in support of the redoubtable Cardinal Joseph Zen, emeritus bishop of Hong Kong. The pontiff says he is “happy with the dialogue,” the results of which have been “good.” They are, in truth, a disgrace.
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George Weigel “the pursuit of this diplomatic fantasy has muted the Vatican’s voice on behalf of all persecuted believers in China, in defense of Jimmy Lai, a devout Catholic, and in support of the redoubtable Cardinal Joseph Zen emeritus bishop of Hong Kong (pictured). The pontiff says he is “happy with the dialogue,” the results of which have been “good.” They are, in truth, a disgrace.”
