Reforming the Vatican’s policy on China should be a priority of the next papacy. The current approach is defined by the Vatican’s controversial 2018 agreement with China to share power with Beijing in the appointment of Catholic bishops. It severely compromises the Catholic Church in China and erodes papal religious and moral authority.
Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Cardinal Parolin is the architect of the China deal and its chief enthusiast. Beijing has not-so-subtly signaled that he is China’s top pick for the next pope. At a press conference on April 22—one day after Pope Francis’s death—Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun dangled the prospect of “improvement of China-Vatican relations” through “continued” partnership, and no one among the leading papal candidates has more experience working with China than Cardinal Parolin.
The deal endangers faithful clergy in China. A stark reminder of this reality came last month when the Chinese state security authorities indefinitely detained Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of the Catholic diocese of Wenzhou without due process. This is the sixty-one-year-old underground prelate’s eighth detention over the last seven years.
At least ten Catholic bishops in China are presently in indefinite detention or otherwise restricted in their ministries for opposing government control over their church. The Vatican silently accepts and covers up this repression and, after the 2018 deal, has withdrawn its support from the underground church.
In addition to these sidelined bishops, there are those who died in the past seven years and left their seats vacant. The Vatican and China have only replaced about a dozen of them, leaving approximately thirty bishoprics empty. Nevertheless, the Vatican, like Beijing, insists that the deal is working, and renewed it last October for another four years.
China immediately began using the agreement to pressure bishops into joining the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a group directed by the Chinese Communist party’s United Front Work Department. Members are required to make an anti-Catholic pledge of “independence” from the pope. No pope has recognized the association as legitimate.
Cardinal Parolin has cooperated in pushing Catholic clergy into the Patriotic Association. In 2019, the Vatican, under its own name and not the pope’s, issued pastoral guidelines that established association membership as the new normal for the Chinese clergy, while permitting conscientious objection to it. At the same time, China took the lead in appointing Chinese bishops.
As a result, clergy who express political loyalty to President Xi Jinping earn favor with the Chinese government, and those who refuse to renounce religious affiliation with the pope are suppressed. The diocese of Shanghai is a prime example of this. Since the seventeenth century, Shanghai has been China’s largest and most important diocese. It was the diocese of Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei, the world’s first Chinese Catholic bishop, who endured thirty-three years of imprisonment for refusing to renounce the pope. Thanks to the China deal, this venerable diocese is now in the hands of the Patriotic Association, with papal blessing.
In the last fourteen years, two Vatican-approved bishops of Shanghai have been persecuted. Joseph Xing Wenzhi mysteriously disappeared from public view in 2011 after serving as auxiliary bishop for six years with government approval. He lost party trust after proclaiming that he would “loyally serve” the pope at his episcopal ordination and after consistently resisting membership in the Patriotic Association. The following year, Thaddeus Ma Daqin was appointed bishop of Shanghai with approval of both the Vatican and Beijing. At his ordination Mass, he publicly quit the Patriotic Association, invoking the words of St. Ignatius: “We have to choose a way that will serve God with greater glory.” He was put under house arrest that day in a seminary where he remains imprisoned without due process. Neither his nor Xing’s freedom was part of the Vatican’s deal.
On April 4, 2023, the Patriotic Association’s council of bishops unilaterally appointed Bishop Joseph Shen Bin, its own head, to lead the diocese of Shanghai. Pope Francis was given no say in the matter, but he nevertheless approved Shen’s installation three months after the fact. Cardinal Parolin quickly praised Shen as an “esteemed pastor” and misleadingly stated that papal approval was “to rectify the canonical irregularity” for the “greater good of the diocese.” He also hoped that cooperating with China might “favor a just and wise solution” for Bishops Xing and Ma. Those hopes were dashed when, on April 28, Beijing bypassed them for the auxiliary bishop position in Shanghai, brazenly using the papal interregnum to again violate the agreement and “elect” a patriotic priest as a new bishop and unilaterally appoint him as Shen’s auxiliary.
Bishop Shen exhibits a party fervor that, given his new stature, promises to drastically transform the Chinese Catholic Church. In an August 2023 diocesan interview, he was adamant that his flock reject papal authority, insisting that they “adhere to the principle of independence and autonomy in running the Church.” A few months earlier, Shen had summoned Hong Kong clergy to a meeting that he opened by hailing the CCP’s recent “victoriously held” Twentieth National Congress, and saying the “spirit” of the congress would aid the Patriotic Association’s aim of “Sinicization” of the Church in China. He also affirmed “Xi Jinping’s thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era,” boding a worrying syncretism of Catholic and communist ideology as the CCP attempts to conform religion to party doctrine. Shen shocked the Hong Kong clergy, stating: “It is necessary to jointly promote [with the government] the translation and interpretation of the Bible.”
Shanghai is not the exception. Since the agreement, other episcopal posts have been filled with CCP zealots, approved by the Vatican, while the faithful bishops are persecuted. For example, at Beijing’s insistence in 2018, the Vatican asked Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin of Mindong to step down to make way for an excommunicated bishop who was then rehabilitated and approved by Pope Francis. In January, Bishop Guo was last photographed locked up in a parish church compound.
The Vatican has long applied its Ostpolitik policy of not criticizing China. But in 2018, when the Curia began pushing the deal, it started actively whitewashing Beijing. That year, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences made headlines when he lauded the Chinese for “best realiz[ing] the social doctrine of the Church.” Cardinal Parolin has repeatedly promoted Chinese propaganda. At a 2020 press conference, he outright denied China’s “persecution” of the Church, saying there were only “regulations that are imposed and which concern all religions.”
The cardinal also falsely asserted that “Sinicization” refers “without confusion” to “inculturation,” which is the missionary practice of adopting local art and approved cultural practices in Christian devotion. Yet, Sinicization under the CCP requires sermons to be centered on Xi Jinping’s sayings and children to be “shielded” from religious exposure. As of May 1, foreigners and Chinese are not allowed to participate together in religious activities, among other restrictions.
Joseph Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong accused Cardinal Parolin of “manipulating” Pope Francis into approving the deal by falsely claiming that Pope Benedict XVI had approved its draft. In an October 2020 blog post, the Hong Kong cardinal didn’t mince words: “Parolin knows he is lying, he knows that I know he is a liar, he knows that I will tell everyone that he is a liar.”
Beijing has taken advantage of the agreement, and the Catholic Church is suffering for it. A better policy—one that does not share the pope’s important power of appointing Catholic Church leadership with an atheistic government and that supports the perpetuation of the Church through a faithful underground—is long overdue.