SPEAKING FREELY China's Catholic body vs the Vatican
By Vaughan Winterbottom
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
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If you're a journalist, last November and March were great months to try your hand at international comparative politics. The US presidential election on November 6? Always a solid story. But for that extra "edge", the kind of bait that will recast your piece of American political punditry as a sapient treatise on international affairs, why not contrast the US election with the appointment of Xi Jinping as secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party on November 15?
The synchronicity of the power transitions was a once-in-40-year
event, after all. Plus, you'll meet all the requisites of the zeitgeist: the Rising Power of China, The Clash of Civilizations, and the relative merits of America's muscular, tug-of-war democracy versus China's opaque, corrupt one-party system that strangely seems to get things done.
March was even better. February 28 saw Pope Benedict XVI summon his last incantations before adopting the "Emeritus" appellation and heading for a distinctly earthly retirement of "watching Italian television and playing the piano''. He was replaced two weeks and a puff of white smoke later by Francis, the first non-European pope in over 1,200 years.
Xi Jinping was voted in - 2,952 to one against - as president of China less than 24 hours after Francis emerged victorious from the papal conclave. Comparisons between the two elections and the two countries in which they took place were inevitable.
Most analysis went as follows. The pope is sovereign of the smallest internationally recognized independent state in the world by population; the president of China heads the largest. Yet the size of the population over which the two nations hold sway is oddly similar. There are roughly 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world; 1.3 billion people have Chinese citizenship.
What's more - and it's a juicy oddity ripe for media picking - China and the Holy See have had no official diplomatic relations since 1951. Cue a myriad of talking points: The Clash of Civilizations (again), Freedom of Religion in China, The Vatican's ability to influence citizens of foreign countries, and, of course, Taiwan.
A predictable trend emerged in the commentary. China was uniformly cast in a negative light, while the Vatican found itself the beneficiary of quite a bit of positive press. For this, we can assume, the cardinals were much relieved.
Benedict's eight-year tenure was marred by continuous scandal. We now know that thousands and thousands of young boys were abused by church clerics. The Vatican's detractors - and there are many more today than there were 10 years ago - watched on with schadenfreude as the Ubermensch of Marktl fumbled his way to doing nothing to punish pedophile priests.
The sex abuse saga was a worldwide tragedy and a symptom of an increasingly irrelevant, morally bankrupt institution.
China says the Vatican should "refrain from interfering in China's internal affairs'', which is paraphrasing a sentence in Article 36 of the 1982 Chinese Constitution: "Religious bodies and religious affairs are not subject to any foreign domination." Wise words indeed. In the wake of the sex-abuse scandals, would you like to give freer range to Vatican-appointed priests to dominate the bodies of religious youth in your country?
Some media commentators, it seems, would like to do just that.
Many lambasted China's insistence on internalizing the running of the country's Catholic establishment. Criticism was heaped on the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), a government-backed religious supervisory body established in 1957, for conducting "sacramentally invalid" episcopal ordinations.
Assuming the pope is just a man, whom would you rather see make episcopal ordinations - a stuffy, tone-deaf bureaucracy with penchant for patriotic propaganda that stupidly arrests bishops who refuse to tow the Chinese Communist Party line; or a stuffy, tone-deaf bureaucracy with a penchant for accommodating pedophiles? It's a tough choice.
Freedom of religion is obviously lacking in China. The country officially recognizes five ''religions'': Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. Chinese should be free to believe in whatever they want, whether it be papal supremacy, thetans, or The Force.
Catholics should be protected under Article 36. "The State protects normal religious activities'', it reads - in reference to the five official religions. But "not subject to any foreign domination'', buried a couple of lines down, is a catch that puts the Chinese government and the Vatican on a direct collision cause.
Don't forget, mind you, that the Vatican is just as stubborn as China when it comes to protecting its flock.
"In the Catholic Church which is in China, the universal Church is present, the Church of Christ, which in the Creed we acknowledge to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, that is to say, the universal community of the Lord's disciples... the Roman Pontiff, as the Successor of Peter, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation? " wrote Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his Letter to Chinese Catholics in May 2007.
And so, the incompatibility of one sentence in the Chinese Constitution (and the government's paranoid fear of organized civil society, especially when headquartered abroad) and the pope's insistence on his own supremacy has forced large contingents of China's 12 million-odd Catholics underground. In "house churches", they risk government browbeating and even jail time. In "official churches", they risk an eternity in hell. Again, a tough choice. What's to be done?
The CPCA is not the bogeyman
While there's no signs the Vatican is changing its ways, the CPCA has actually grown much more amenable to Vatican influence in recent years. Some reformists in the Holy See have been calling for compromise.
The logic for potential compromise was laid out in Italic English by Gianni Valente, director of 30Days, a Catholic magazine, way back in 2004. As he wrote:
Sustaining the invalidity of those Episcopal consecrations [without Papal approval] also meant invalidating the priestly ordinations performed by those bishops and as a consequence the removal of the value and efficacy of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confession celebrated in the churches which the regime was beginning to reopen after the terrible years of the cultural Revolution. A treasure of grace and Christian comfort which many faithful could again draw on with a certain ease, often after having suffered persecution.
And persecuted they were.
In the 1950s, China sought to rid itself of its traditional past, which it saw as the reason for its decline relative to Europe and eventual subjugation at the hands of foreign powers. A crackdown on religion - all religions - was one manifestation of the rejection of the past.
In 1957, the CPCA was formed. Chinese Catholics were required to obey the pope only in matters pertaining to faith and church law. Sino-Vatican ties had been severed six years before.
It's worth noting that the CPCA never advocated for the idea of an "independent Church" or a "reformation" in China, but rather sought to encourage "displaying patriotic love for one's country". Nonetheless, in the years following the CPCA's establishment the number of bishops ordained with explicit sanctioning from Rome fall dramatically.
The plight of the faithful in China reached its apogee during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. During this decade of collective insanity, all public religious activities ceased and all church properties were confiscated. Church buildings were converted into factories or storehouses. Many were demolished. Religious leaders were imprisoned and murdered by red guards, and the CPCA buried its head in the sand.
The year 1976 saw bans on religious belief and practice relaxed. 1978 was a watershed year in which representatives from the five officially recognized religions reappeared at the meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The CPCA recommenced its activities in the same year.
Since then the Chinese Church's official acknowledgement of papal primacy has developed.
The Center for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society at the City University of Hong Kong records that the prayer for the pope that had been removed from the book of Collection of Important Prayers reintroduced in 1982. In February 1989, the government allowed spiritual affiliation with the Holy See, and in April of the same year the Bishops' Conference acknowledged the pope as the spiritual leader of the Chinese Church. By the end of the decade, most congregations had also restored the prayer for the pope during Mass.
Singing the pope's praises in an official Catholic church in China will not get you arrested. Your fellow parishioners will probably join in.
Fast forward to the new millennium, and efforts at reconciliation have been coming from both sides. In his 2007 letter to Chinese Catholics, Benedict, quoting his predecessor Pope John Paul II, noted that,
The Church has very much at heart the values and objectives which are of primary importance also to modern China: solidarity, peace, social justice, the wise management of the phenomenon of globalization.
He added,
I realize that the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China requires time and presupposes the good will of both parties. For its part, the Holy See always remains open to negotiations, so necessary if the difficulties of the present time are to be overcome.
While there were some veiled criticisms of the CPCA in the letter, cooperation and agreement between the association and the Holy See on the appointment of Chinese bishops took tentative steps forward under Benedict. A highlight was the ordination of Joseph Li Shan in September 2007 as Bishop of Beijing, with papal approval.
Nonetheless, several subsequent ordinations without express papal approval, and Li Shan's recourse to patriotic mumblings in some public speeches, have stirred discontent in Rome.
Dissenting bishops continue to be imprisoned. It's the sad manifestation of a paranoid ruling party desperate to hang on to power. But if the Vatican refuses to cooperate with the CPCA on the future ordination of bishops, it will only make things worse for Chinese Catholics.
Of course, the fate of cooperation on episcopal ordinations means little in the context of the Sino-Vatican 60-year diplomatic stare-off. The real sticking point is Taiwan.
China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying, congratulating Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio on his election as the new pope on March 15, added a slight: "We call on the Vatican to sever its so-called diplomatic relations with Taiwan and recognize the Chinese government as the sole legal representative of all of China."
The Vatican is one of only 23 countries to maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. It refuses to recognize the PRC on the basis of its government being communist. But given China's Gini coefficient (a measure of wealth inequality, in which zero expresses perfect equality) of 0.61 - compared to a world average of 0.44 - and 83 dollar billionaires in the country's legislature, is there anyone outside the Vatican that would still argue China is a communist country? Corrupt, sure. But communist?
There are 300,000-odd Catholics in Taiwan. There are about 12 million in China. The Vatican should reconsider its priorities. If it does, it may even be able to "cash in" on the Chinese people's increasingly shaky faith in materialism.
Oh, and it should stop protecting child rapists.
Vaughan Winterbottom is a writer and translator based in Beijing. His work has appeared in The Moscow Times, Russia Behind the Headlines, South China Morning Post and Beijing Review.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing. Articles submitted for this section allow our readers to express their opinions and do not necessarily meet the same editorial standards of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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