Uneasy pact appears to suit Vatican and China right now
- Both Rome and Beijing have bigger things to worry about than a deal on mutually acceptable bishops especially as Hong Kong’s top Catholic cleric travels to meet mainland counterpart
Beijing has been playing hard ball with the Vatican. Having tentatively reached an agreement in 2018 on the method of selecting mutually acceptable bishops on the mainland, China hasn’t been exactly following it.
This month, Beijing named Joseph Shen Bin as the new bishop of Shanghai, the country’s biggest Catholic diocese, apparently without seeking prior approval from Rome under the 2018 agreement, which was extended for two years in 2022. It was likewise with the appointment in November of the auxiliary bishop of Jiangxi, a diocese which the Vatican does not even recognise. Of course, the pact has never been published, so we don’t know what the exact terms are.
But besides issuing a statement of protest, the Vatican has not gone for the nuclear option and accused Beijing of not honouring their deal. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and second-in-command in charge of the equivalent of the city state of Rome’s foreign policy, has been consistently conciliatory with Beijing to the extent that he has been accused of “shameless” and “dishonest” appeasement by the former head of the Hong Kong diocese, Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun.
Perhaps as a small reward, the city’s current diocese head, Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-yan, will travel to the mainland this week at the invitation of his Beijing counterpart Joseph Li Shan, who is also head of the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
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The first such visit from Hong Kong in 29 years, such a highly symbolic invitation would not be possible without Beijing’s authorisation. Clearly Chinese leaders don’t want to make the Vatican completely lose face. Meanwhile, Parolin must hope that at some future point, the agreement will stick. But to put it bluntly, the Vatican has no leverage while China clearly thinks it has all the time in the world.
Zen was arrested last May on suspicion of breaching national security in Hong Kong. His politicised Catholic followers had been a key part of the city’s opposition movement, which has now been neutralised. Without a Catholic base to challenge its authority, Beijing has little incentive to compromise with Rome.
Meanwhile, from a more cynical perspective, mainland China is no longer the growth market for the Vatican, as it once was at the turn of the century. Through a mixture of control, regulation and outright repression, the Catholic population – whose exact size is highly disputed but is estimated to be from a meagre 5 to 10 million – has been shrinking.
Faced with an existential crisis of legitimacy in the West – over such key issues as same-sex marriage, priestly celibacy, the acceptability of homosexuality as well as the decades-long sex abuse scandals of the worst criminality and cover-ups that span continents – the Vatican may no longer consider China a policy priority. Why start a confrontation with a communist state without the chance of a good outcome?
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A similar cynical calculation applies in China. Having seen the alliance between the late Pope John Paul II, who was Polish, and the union movement of Solidarity in bringing down the Polish communist government, which in turn helped trigger the domino-like collapse of the Soviet Union, Beijing can only look on the Catholic Church with great suspicion, a distrust that was only made worse by Zen’s openly declared fanatical anti-communism and the significant role he allegedly played in the 2019 unrest.
Be that as it may, Beijing has a strong incentive to establish diplomatic recognition with Rome at this time. Only 12 countries, plus the Vatican, are left in the world that still recognise Taiwan. Securing a formal relationship with the Holy See will be of symbolic significance. It will be seen as the further diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and proof of religious tolerance against Western criticisms of repression and persecution, a major anti-China narrative of Cold War 2.0.
But, perhaps like the Vatican, Beijing has more pressing existential challenges on its plate, such as contending with an openly hostile United States and the possibility of a war over Taiwan.
