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March 13, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A group of English Catholics, including Deacon Nick Donnelly and regular LifeSite contributor Dr. Joseph Shaw, have signed an open letter calling for the Vatican’s deal with China to be “torn up.”

“We the undersigned are writing to express our burning anxiety at the Vatican’s treaty with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the light of the China Tribunal’s findings into forced organ harvesting,” the letter published in the Catholic Herald begins.

The London-based human rights group, China Tribunal, told the U.N. Human Rights Council in September last year that China takes skin, kidneys, lungs, and hearts from members of the persecuted religious groups, especially members of the proscribed Falun Gong religious group and Uighur Muslims.

Deacon Donnelly has posted on Twitter saying the wording of the letter by English Catholics protesting Pope Francis’s deal with the People’s Republic of China is “no coincidence.”

“With burning anxiety was the title of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge protesting the inhumanities of the Nazis regime,” he explained.

The letter highlights the “[w]idespread accounts of rape and torture” within the Beijing government’s state-run program of forced organ-harvesting from prisoners of conscience and points out that the government also “harasses and detains leading Catholic clergy and destroys Catholic shrines and churches which refuse to join the official ‘Patriotic Church.’”

“Despite these recent and present human rights abuses, some Vatican representatives have shamed their office and their Christian profession in their responses to concerns about the Holy See’s 22nd September 2018 provisional agreement with the PRC,” the letter states.

“In 2018, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, asserted that the Chinese government had ‘accomplished the reform of the organ donation system’ and even went on to claim that ‘those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.’”

The content of The Vatican-China agreement, signed in September 2018, is yet to be made public but is thought by many Vatican-observers to allow Chinese communist authorities to handpick bishops who will then be approved by the pope, contrary to Catholic teaching.

In August 2019, the Vatican confirmed the consecration of the first Chinese bishop following the controversial deal. Last week, Pope Francis encouraged Chinese Catholics in the communist-run country to be “good citizens” and not to engage in “proselytism.”

The signatories say it is a “scandal” that not even Cardinal Zen, retired bishop of Hong Kong, has seen a copy of the agreement.

“The time has come for the Vatican to rescind its treaty with the PRC and by so doing stand in forthright solidarity with all victims of totalitarian oppression,” the letter concludes.

FULL TEXT OF THE LETTER

The Vatican-China deal should be torn up

SIR – We the undersigned are writing to express our burning anxiety at the Vatican’s treaty with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the light of the China Tribunal’s findings into forced organ harvesting.

The Tribunal was commissioned by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse – a group of lawyers, academics, medical professionals and human rights advocates – and chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.

It found that Beijing’s government is conducting a state-run programme of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience and detailed acts of torture committed in the course of the programme including:

Killing prisoners by the removal of organs, lethal injection and “organ harvesting under the pretext of brain death”;

Widespread accounts of rape and torture, including harrowingly graphic stories of sexual violence and prisoners being “shocked” with electric rods, with one woman “shocked until [she went] blind”;

The use of the so-called “tiger chair”, a torture device, on Uighur prisoners.

In his submitted evidence, leading human rights lawyer Edward Fitzgerald CBE QC said the treatment of Falun Gong in China could meet the legal definition of genocide.

The Tribunal concluded that such acts constituted crimes against humanity and said it was certain beyond reasonable doubt that they had occurred.

This damning finding echoes that of the US Congressional Executive Committee in 2018 that the mass arbitrary internment of as many as one million or more Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in ‘‘political re-education’’ camps in western China may be the largest incarceration of an ethnic minority population since World War II, and may constitute crimes against humanity.

Despite these recent and present human rights abuses, some Vatican representatives have shamed their office and their Christian profession in their responses to concerns about the Holy See’s 22nd September 2018 provisional agreement with the PRC. In 2018, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, asserted that the Chinese government had “accomplished the reform of the organ donation system” and even went on to claim that “those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese”.

We note that the text of the treaty has been kept so secret that not even Cardinal Zen has actually seen a copy of the agreement. That in itself is a scandal.

The case for opposing the Vatican’s deal with Xi Jinping’s government, which also harasses and detains leading Catholic clergy and destroys Catholic shrines and churches which refuse to join the official “Patriotic Church”, was already formidably strong. Now, it is unarguable. The time has come for the Vatican to rescind its treaty with the PRC and by so doing stand in forthright solidarity with all victims of totalitarian oppression.

Signatories

John M Barrie

Joanna Bogle DSG

James Bogle

Prof. Philip Booth

Thomas Bridge

James Bundy

Clara Campbell

Philip Campbell

Clare Carberry

James Cross

Patrick Cusworth

Deacon Nick Donnelly

Fr Timothy Finigan

Ian Jessiman

Dr Paul Keeley

Ellie King

Catherine Lafferty

Timothy Martin

Richard McCarthy

Sean McKenna

Anthony Murphy

Prof. David Paton

Fr David Palmer

James Preece

Jamie Rodney

Benedict Rogers

Dr Joseph Shaw

Kathy Sinnott

Gerald Soane

Mark Thorne

Peter D. Williams