In four brief statements issued yesterday, the Vatican announced two developments with respect to the People’s Republic of China:

Beijing and the Holy See have signed an agreement on the protocol for the appointment of Catholic bishops in the PRC. The Vatican gave no information on what the protocol is.

Pope Francis “has decided to readmit to full ecclesial communion” eight bishops (one of them deceased) who had been approved by Beijing but not by Rome. That means that now all of China’s 75 (by my count) active bishops are in communion with the pope.

Fifteen of those 75 are “underground” bishops. That is, they’re not recognized by the Chinese government. It’s natural to speculate that Beijing will, in a quid pro quo, recognize them eventually. If it does, that might please the Vatican, but as for the bishops themselves, and for many of the faithful they pastor, Beijing’s “blessing” is exactly what they seek to avoid. They consider the government’s presence in the life of the Church to be pernicious.


The more plausible outcome for Chinese Catholics who reject government interference in the Church is that the “underground” character of their communities will be dissolved in a gradual, indirect manner, one that would be in the style of both the Vatican and the Chinese government. Already four of the underground bishops are well past the official retirement age of 75, and all 15 will have reached that milestone by 2038. As each one retires, Rome and Beijing can simply replace him with a bishop who belongs to the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (PCA), the organization that was established, in the 1950s, as the legal, government-controlled alternative to the Church, which had been effectively banned after the Communist takeover in 1949.


That’s when some Catholics went underground. In time, others joined local churches run by the PCA. The division between the two camps was sharp. By now, it’s been blurred. Proponents of erasing what remains of the distinction between underground and government-approved churches envision that all Chinese Catholics will be united under the PCA, which is in communion with Rome already, for most practical purposes.

From speaking with Catholics who know the Church in China firsthand and, for the sake of Church unity, favor Vatican concessions to Beijing, I gather that they see underground diehards much as many mainstream Catholics in America regard Latin Mass traditionalists: as cranky and disagreeable, disruptive and dissident. Many Catholics who only want to build up the Church in the challenging environment that is the PRC consider the underground holdouts, not the Chinese government, to be the primary obstacle to their objective.


The last high-profile demonstration of underground resistance was in 2012, when Thaddeus Ma Daquin, whom both Rome and Beijing had approved as an auxiliary bishop of Shanghai, renounced the PCA at his ordination. He was disappeared after the ceremony. Three years later, under house arrest, he recanted. For that he was praised, last year in La Civilità Cattolica, a Jesuit publication out of Rome, as “a Chinese bishop with a healthy realism. . . . Even if he is currently under house arrest, he is trying to engage positively with his government.”


Apologists for giving the Chinese government a decision-making role in the appointment of bishops point to plenty of precedent, including Vietnam today. And throughout Church history, arrangements whereby political authorities participate in the selection of bishops have been common, though often controversial. The Church’s freedom from state interference in the selection of bishops is a religious freedom that, we tend to assume, is universally valued, but it isn’t. It’s an anomaly, an experiment now coming to its end, if anti-liberals are correct that liberal democracy is dying and that we should want to hasten its demise anyway. China, Viktor Orbán assures us, is a “star” example of “systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies and perhaps not even democracies” but that “can nevertheless make their nations successful.”


“Liberal thought has liquidated the concept of the common good,” Cardinal Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said in an interview earlier this year. “At this moment, those who best realize the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.” You may think that Orbán and the Argentine cardinal live at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but look where they end up, both of them badmouthing liberalism and holding up the PRC as a model state for others to emulate.

In Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, we read that religious communities “have the right not to be hindered, either by legal measures or by administrative action on the part of government, in the selection . . . of their own ministers.” If the longstanding speculation is correct and the agreement that was signed yesterday in Beijing gives the Chinese government a large say in the appointment of bishops, the most obvious way to reconcile that with the Church’s pro forma insistence on religious freedom would be to argue that Rome freely chooses to collaborate with the Chinese Communists, whose aims, in its judgment, dovetail with those of Catholic social teaching. Did someone say “integralism”?




Over generations, a critical mass of Chinese Catholics have successfully resisted the intrusion of the government into the affairs of their local churches. Many so-called underground churches are above ground in fact and operate openly, with the tacit approval of local officials who know the Catholic community and see no problem with it. If an underground church, priest, or bishop does encounter trouble with the government, it’s likely to be at the behest of regional authorities or Beijing. One could argue that it’s in the interest of underground churches to sign a piece of paper and agree to call themselves members of the PCA, but freedom from such affiliation is important to some Catholics.

It’s not to the Vatican diplomats who are negotiating their future or to the many Catholics who advocate, in effect, that the religious pluralism that has grown up in the Church in China be trimmed back. They have the best interest of the Church at heart. My sympathy goes instead to Chinese Catholics who put religious principles above practical considerations. It disappoints me that leaders of the institutional Church no longer go to bat for them.