This year is full of symbolism, anniversaries, and deadlines. It can mark the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church in China—or the end of the beginning.
by Marco Respinti
The traditional Chinese calendar—a lunisolar calendar combining solar, lunar, and other cycles—marks 2024 as the Year of The Dragon, the fifth of the 12-year cycle of animals of the Chinese zodiac. Each year of that calendar is cyclically associated with one of the five agents constituting “Wuxing” in Chinese philosophy. 2024 is the year of Wood Dragon and connects these ancient Taoist concept with today Chinese Catholicism’s struggle to resist the persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 2024 marks in fact the centennial of the first meeting of all the bishops of China in the Council of Shangai (May 15–June 12, 1924) and will see the Vatican-China Deal of 2018, subsequently renovated in 2020 and 2022, becoming permanent or being definitively abandoned.
Three premises loom large on the fate of the Catholic Church in China in 2024. The first is the “Five-Year Plan for the Sinicization of Catholicism in China (2023–2027),” approved on December 14, 2023, by the official body that unites the Conference of Catholic Bishops (not recognized as such by the Holy See, while all its member Bishops are now recognized) and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, both operating under the supervision of the United Front Work Department of the CCP. It follows and extends the “Five-Year Plan on Carrying Forward the Catholic Church’s Adherence to the Direction of Sinicization in Our Country (2018–2022).” Notably, this two documents were paralleled by the “Outline of a Five-Year Work Plan To Further Advance the Sinicization of Christianity (2023–2027),” published on December 19, 2023, and the “Outline of the Five-year Working Plan for Promoting the Sinicization of Christianity in our Country (2018–2022”), both formulated by two government-sanctioned Chinese Protestant national committees, the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, also under the supervision of officials from the United Front Work Department of the CCP. Similar plans have been and are adopted in China for other religions as well, as the “Five-Year Planning Outline for Persisting in the Sinification of Islam (2018–2022)” shows. These documents demonstrate the constant and tireless work of the Chinese regime to control and twist all religions.
The second premise is the “Shanghaied Holy See,” or the blitz by the CCP that imposed to the Vatican the nomination without the Pope’s authorization of Giovanni Peng Weizhao as Auxiliary Bishop of Jiangxi on November 24, 2022, and of Joseph Shen Bin as Bishop of Shanghai on April 4, 2023. This made “now obvious that the Vatican-China deal of 2018 is regarded by the CCP as binding for the Vatican only, which is expected not to criticize religious persecution in China, but not binding for Beijing, which appoints Catholic Bishops as it deems fit, with or without Papal mandate.” In the end, Pope Francis accepted to ratify the appointment of Shen Bin post factum.
The third and last premise is the ordination of three new Chinese bishops in less than a week at the beginning of the 2024 of the Dragon: Thaddeus Wang Yuesheng on January 25 as bishop of Zhengzhou; Anthony Sun Wenjun on January 29 as bishop of the newly established dioceses of Weifang; and Peter Wu Yishun on January 31 as the head of the Apostolic Prefecture of Shaowu, which had been without a bishop since 1964. This time the ordinations had the approval of the Pope and were the first agreed upon by both the Vatican and the Chinese government since 2022, in compliance with the Deal of 2018.
What is at stake in 2024 for the Catholic Church, and its ties with these three premises, is illuminated by an article as brief as brilliant by Father Gianni Criveller, penned in Italian and subsequently translated in English, Spanish and Chinese in “AsiaNews,” the influential and informative portal of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME). Italian, born in 1961, a Roman Catholic priest since 1986, Criveller lived and taught in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 1991 to 2017. A sinologist, historian and theologian, the author of hundreds article and books, in his article Criveller highlights three important points.
First, “the impression that there is, on the Chinese side, the will not to break with Rome and to permanently ratify the agreement” of 2018. This is suggested by the “three agreed ordinations, accompanied by the recognition by the Holy See of the establishment of a new diocese,” Weifang, in the province of Shandong, “with borders redrawn by the Chinese authorities.” That intention, Criveller adds, “has rightly been commented on positively by observers” but reveals how useful the 2018 Deal is for Beijing in nurturing the idea that the Vatican legitimizes the CCP rule.
Second, “[i]t should be remembered that this ‘good’ news must be contextualised: if it is true that the Pope appoints the bishops, they are not chosen by him but by an autonomous process led by the Chinese authorities, the details of which are not known, as the text of the agreement remains secret. Those elected in China are therefore Catholic bishops, but at the same time certainly appreciated by the authorities.” In fact, “in no way, in China, are the Pope and the Holy See or the agreement mentioned when these appointments are announced. I fear that even during the liturgy of the ordination itself, the pontifical nomination is not given due prominence. In any case, the celebrations of episcopal consecrations have not been accessible to external observers for some time now.” Here Criveller quotes the “Five-Year Plan for the Sinicization of Catholicism in China (2023–2027),” “published on Christmas Day on the website of the Chinese Catholic Church:” it “never mentions the Pope and the Holy See; nor the agreement between the Vatican and China.” Instead, “[t]he leader Xi Jinping is nominated four times; five times it is reiterated that Catholicism must take on ‘Chinese characteristics 中国特色.’ The word sinicization (中国化) reigns supreme: it occurs 53 times.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the Italian missionary priest offers a precious clarification of an abused concept: “sinicization.” It in fact originated not as an abusive term and was, Criveller explains, de facto consecrated by the 1924 Council of Shangai. That was the first meeting of all the bishops of China, but among them there were no Chinese bishops. The odd by-product of a long and risky, as well as commendable, effort by Western missionaries, at that time all Catholic bishops were foreigners. The Council of Shangai was then summoned to cope with that situation and give flesh to the letter encyclical “Maximun Illud,” issued by Pope Benedict XV (1854–1922) in 1919, which called for an “inculturation” of the Catholic faith. An old term, the concept of “inculturation” was roundly defined by Pope John Paul II’s (1920–2005) 1985 encyclical “Slavorum Apostoli:” “the incarnation of the Gospel in native cultures and also the introduction of these cultures into the life of the Church.” “Sinicization” was then the name of “inculturation” in China and, “[i]n 1926, the first six Chinese bishops were finally ordained.”
But today the CCP mystifies the term and use it to ideologize religion. As the “Five-Year Plan for the Sinicization of Catholicism in China (2023–2027) reads, “[i]t is necessary to intensify research to give theological foundation to the sinicization of Catholicism, to continuously improve the system of sinicized theological thought, to build a solid theoretical foundation for the sinicization of Catholicism, so that it constantly manifests itself with Chinese characteristics.” What the CCP means by this, Criveller comments, is not “a stage in the legitimate ecclesial process of inculturation.” It is rather an “imposition […], by an authoritarian regime, of the adaptation of the practice of faith to the religious policy established by the political authorities.” Thus, “the control by political authorities over Catholic believers—a control that they would like to pass off as sinicization—is conveniently and ambiguously justified in the name of the inculturation of the Gospel.” In other words, the CCP attempts to reformulate Christianity “with Chinese characteristics” or to “Communistize the faith.”
Contributing much on the important difference between the legitimate, and healthy, use of “sinicization” and its weaponization by the CCP, Criveller, who is not among the ideological super-critics of the Pope, rather the contrary, denounces yet another attempt of the CCP to tame the Vatican. On the horns of the dilemma between the consecration of the catastrophic 2018 Deal or its complete repeal, the Vatican has the occasion to “end the beginning” of the Catholic Church in China by bringing genuine sinicization to the next step and shake a political tyrant off its shoulders—or witness the beginning of its end by succumbing to that tyrant and its ideology. Only in the first case, the Dragon of 2024, symbol of celestial wisdom, would score a decisive point against the Red Dragon of Chinese Communism.
The post The Catholic Church in China, AD 2024: A Tale of Two Sinicizations and Two Dragons first appeared on Bitter Winter.