ROME -- The Vatican has said it intends to renew its controversial agreement with Beijing for the joint appointment of bishops in the autumn despite scant evidence that it has improved the lot of Chinese Catholics.

 

   The decision to renew the secret pact for a third time since it was introduced in 2018 was announced in May by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the top Vatican official after Pope Francis. Parolin told journalists on the margins of an academic conference that the Vatican had been seeking ways of improving the application of the accord, which would be renewed by the end of the year.

 

   “We love and admire China, its people, its culture, its traditions, the efforts it is making at the moment. China is close to the heart of Pope Francis and his collaborators,” Parolin told the conference. "As a result of the agreement, all the bishops in the land of Confucius are in full communion with the Church of Peter.”

 

  The accord has the advantage for the Vatican of avoiding a schism within China’s estimated 12 million Catholics, between a “Patriotic Church” loyal to the communist regime and an underground church faithful to Rome. The Holy See is keen to re-establish diplomatic relations, which were interrupted in 1951 when the church was expelled from the mainland by the communist government.

 

  Critics say the agreement is often flouted by the Chinese side and has forced the Vatican to remain silent about human rights abuses and the erosion of democracy in Hong Kong.

 

  “I could understand at the beginning that the Vatican hoped the agreement would enable it to protect Catholics inside China, but the situation has only got worse,” said Laura Harth, campaign director for Safeguard Defender, an NGO working for civil rights in China and Vietnam. “Renewing the agreement for a third time is like rewarding China while the repression intensifies.”

 

  Harth said it was remarkable that the Vatican had not taken a position on the case of Jimmy Lai, a newspaper publisher imprisoned for his pro-democracy activism in Hong Kong whose resistance to the communist regime was inspired by his Catholic faith. 

 

  “A lot of the activists in Hong Kong are Catholics. The Vatican has ignored appeals to give them support and to stop whitewashing the regime. It’s disgraceful,” Harth said.

 

  Agostino Giovagnoli, a history professor at the Catholic University in Milan and leading advisor on China policy to the Holy See, said the church had been working behind the scenes to improve the situation but avoided public condemnation, which was ineffective and sometimes harmful.

 

  “Public denunciations are not paid for by the Vatican but by people living on the spot,” he said. “The pact is a good thing, but it’s not enough. We want freedom for all bishops, including those who are being ostracised by the regime and those under house arrest.”

 

  Giovagnoli said the church was making gradual progress and its official presence, a rare example of shared sovereignty on the part of the Chinese, was an advantage for other religions as well.

 

  The meeting at which Parolin announced the intention to renew the bilateral pact with China was held to mark the 100th anniversary of the Council of Shanghai and its organiser, Archbishop Celso Costantini, an Italian who was a pioneer of culturally sensitive evangelisation and was the Vatican’s apostolic delegate to China at the time.

 

  The conference was addressed by Bishop Joseph Shen Bin of Shanghai, the most senior representative of the Catholic Church in China, who criticised the foreign missionaries of the past for adopting a superior attitude, working to protect foreign powers and attempting “cultural colonisation”.

 

  Shen Bin’s appointment to Shanghai in April 2023 came as a slap in the face to the Vatican, announced without prior consultation by the Chinese authorities in violation of their undertaking to share responsibility for bishops’ appointments. The bishop had previously been in charge of the less important diocese of Haimen. The appointment was endorsed by Pope Francis three months later.

 

  Giovagnoli said the misunderstanding may have arisen because the text of the bilateral pact, which remains secret, did not specify the need for consultation in the event of bishops being transferred from one diocese to another.

 

  “The Vatican says it was implicit. The Chinese say it wasn’t implicit,” Giovagnoli said. The snub was all the more surprising because the Vatican actually agreed that Shen Bin was the right man for the job, he added. A series of bilateral meetings have apparently clarified that such a thing should not happen again, he said.

 

  Giovagnoli said Shen Bin’s speeches were all vetted in advance and he never said anything that might upset the Chinese government, but at the same time he enjoyed the confidence of the Holy See. “He is thought to be genuinely faithful to the Pope. He is an intelligent man operating in a very difficult situation,” the Vatican expert said.

 

  The communist government has been working to purge the church of colonial influences in a policy known as “sinicization “.

 

  An analysis published by the Catholic news agency Asia News details the Vatican’s uphill struggle for influence.  The Five-Year Plan for the Sinicization of Catholicism in China (2023-2027) was published on Christmas Day on the website of the Chinese Catholic Church.

 

  “Consisting of 5000 characters (corresponding to approximately 3000 Italian words), the 'Catholic' five-year plan never mentions the Pope and the Holy See; nor the agreement between the Vatican and China,” the article, by missionary priest Gianni Criveller, pointed out. “The leader Xi Jinping is named four times; five times it is reiterated that Catholicism must take on ‘Chinese characteristics'. The word sinicization reigns supreme: it occurs 53 times.”

 

  Criveller said an authoritarian regime was imposing its religious policy on the practice of the Catholic faith in China. “Here there are no believers who freely seek a virtuous dialogue between the Catholic faith and their own cultural roots,” he wrote.

 

  Liberation from colonial influence was being exploited by the regime to extend its control over the church, said Sandro Magister, a veteran Vatican journalist. “It’s wise to be prudent but there’s a limit when it comes to total subordination to the dominant power. The Vatican’s silence is excessive. Chinese Catholics expect greater support from Rome.”

 

  The former director of the Vatican’s Apostolic Archive has offered a glimpse of the climate of suspicion between the two sides, despite which the accord has been repeatedly renewed.

 

  Monsignor Sergio Pagano revealed in a book-length interview with the Italian journalist Massimo Franco that the Vatican had secretly removed its archive from Hong Kong in September 2019.

 

  Pagano said he had been advised to remove the documentation by a member of the local hierarchy, whom he could not name for safety reasons. “The demonstrations had recently begun in Hong Kong against the Beijing regime. And perhaps they already feared that it would end badly,” Pagano said. 

 

  Franco suggested it was unlikely Chinese forces would enter a building occupied by the Holy See. “I fear that nothing and no one would have stopped them,” Pagano responded. The papers were sent to Rome via Manila to avoid arousing the curiosity of the Chinese: not an encouraging basis for the ongoing cooperation.

 

 

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