Time for Vatican and Beijing to tackle domestic objections
Pope and party must deal with vested interests associated with ‘patriotic’ or ‘anti-communist’ Catholic cliques
After months of smooth sailing, talks between Beijing and the Holy See seem to have met some setbacks.
In the past few days, the “godfather” of China’s Catholics, Liu Bainian, gave an interview to the South China Morning Post criticising an essay by the Bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal John Tong Hon.
Tong had written an article explaining that Beijing and the Holy See were quite close to an agreement. He clarified that the parties were closing in on an agreement on the choice of bishops and on a mechanism for how to officially account for the some 30 Chinese bishops not registered with the mainland’s official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
Liu countered that there is still distance on the choice of the bishops and the 30 bishops not in the association were not patriotic and thus not trustworthy for China.
These comments sounded like the mirror image of similar remarks by Tong’s predecessor as bishop, Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who said in November that an agreement with communist China would “betray Christ”.
In fact, the arguments made by Liu and Zen have both their own merit. Liu stressed that bishops should work for China, while Zen underscored the importance of their service to God. In either case, both China and the Church understood the impact of the Chinese Catholics, which otherwise, because of their numbers, were considered almost insignificant.