Holy Smoke: The Vatican's sinister deal with Beijing

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🗓️ 7 August 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Next month, the Vatican will talk to Beijing about renewing its 2018 deal with the Chinese Communist Party that effectively allowed President Xi to choose the country's Catholic bishops. He has used this power to force Catholics loyal to Rome to join the puppet Catholic church set up by Chairman Mao in the 1950s. They can no longer refuse on the grounds that they recognise only the Pope's Church because Francis himself has validated the orders of Xi's party stooges.

But the Holy Father has done more than that: he has ostentatiously failed to condemn China's savage assaults on human rights, the worst of which is its attempt to eradicate the country's Muslim Uyghurs ethnic minority by herding them into concentration camps and forcing Uighur women to have abortions.

As I say in this episode of Holy Smoke, the Pope's behaviour is not just a disgrace but also a mystery. The Catholic Church has gained nothing from the 2018 pact. On the contrary, it has given Beijing a handy excuse to intensify its harassment of Catholics. So why is the Vatican apparently keen to renew a deal that so badly reflects on it?

One plausible explanation is money. Rome hasn't got any. China enjoys nothing more than buying influence. This year, claims surfaced that the Communist Party is quietly slipping the Vatican £1.6 billion a year in order to buy the Pope's silence about the Uyghurs, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the demolition of churches. But no evidence has been produced to support this conspiracy theory.

My guests are the journalist Catherine Lafferty and Fr Benedict Kiely, a campaigner on behalf of persecuted religious minorities.

Transcript

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0:00.0	12 weeks for 12 pounds. Subscribe to The Spectator for this excellent deal and get a 20-pound
0:06.2	Amazon voucher at www.spectator.co.uk forward slash voucher.
0:12.2	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.
0:24.8	Next month, the Vatican and Beijing will start negotiations about the renewal of the 2018 deal,
0:33.0	which gave the Chinese Communist Party the power to nominate Catholic bishops who would be approved by the Pope.
0:40.6	The details of that deal have never been revealed to the world. But what we do know is that
0:45.5	Chinese Catholics are still being persecuted. Their churches are still being demolished. Their clergy
0:51.2	are still being arrested and tortured. And there is overwhelming evidence that some of the bishops whom Pope Francis now recognises are no more than Chinese Communist Party officials in mitas.
1:04.0	It's easy to see what China has got out of the 2018 deal. There is no longer a dissident underground Catholic Church loyal to Rome,
1:13.6	which might pose a threat to the authorities. Instead, it has been merged with Pope Francis's
1:19.6	approval with the Patriotic Association, China's name for its puppet Catholic Church, set up by Chairman Mao in order to propagate
1:28.5	Communist Party ideology disguised as Catholic worship.
1:32.7	That hasn't changed. In fact, under President Xi's process of signification,
1:37.3	China's state-controlled Catholic churches have introduced ever more elements of Communist Party
1:43.1	theology, if you like, and iconography.
1:46.3	Statues of Mao are appearing in churches all over China, replacing those of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
1:52.3	The big difference is that members of the underground church are now expected to go along with this,
1:57.4	and on the orders of the Pope.
1:59.7	That's not to say that Francis has officially endorsed this
2:03.0	signification of Catholicism, but he's enabled it to happen. For example, shortly after his deal was
2:08.9	signed, he ordered the loyal Monsignor Vincent Guo Zijun, the Catholic bishop of Mindong in Fujian province
2:15.7	to step down in favour of Monsignor Zand Silu,
	...

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