The Next Pope Needs a Better China Policy

Reforming the Vatican’s policy on China should be a priority of the next papacy. The current approach is defined by the Vatican’s controversial 2018 agreement with China to share power with Beijing in the appointment of Catholic bishops. It severely compromises the Catholic Church in China and erodes papal religious and moral authority.

Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Cardinal Parolin is the architect of the China deal and its chief enthusiast. Beijing has not-so-subtly signaled that he is China’s top pick for the next pope. At a press conference on April 22—one day after Pope Francis’s death—Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun dangled the prospect of “improvement of China-Vatican relations” through “continued” partnership, and no one among the leading papal candidates has more experience working with China than Cardinal Parolin.

The deal endangers faithful clergy in China. A stark reminder of this reality came last month when the Chinese state security authorities indefinitely detained Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of the Catholic diocese of Wenzhou without due process. This is the sixty-one-year-old underground prelate’s eighth detention over the last seven years.

At least ten Catholic bishops in China are presently in indefinite detention or otherwise restricted in their ministries for opposing government control over their church. The Vatican silently accepts and covers up this repression and, after the 2018 deal, has withdrawn its support from the underground church.

In addition to these sidelined bishops, there are those who died in the past seven years and left their seats vacant. The Vatican and China have only replaced about a dozen of them, leaving approximately thirty bishoprics empty. Nevertheless, the Vatican, like Beijing, insists that the deal is working, and renewed it last October for another four years.

China immediately began using the agreement to pressure bishops into joining the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a group directed by the Chinese Communist party’s United Front Work Department. Members are required to make an anti-Catholic pledge of “independence” from the pope. No pope has recognized the association as legitimate.

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