The Resolve of a Commoner

News about China’s Catholic community since 2018 has been polarized. While some experts and journalists have supported the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with China’s authorities as both necessary and salutary, others have condemned it as either uninformed or a betrayal of China’s Catholics. Over the past six years, I have received reports from China’s priests that have consistently described both improvements and detriments in the wake of 2018. On the same day during a visit to the Beijing cathedral a few years ago, one Chinese priest exclaimed optimism and hope that the pope will someday soon be able to visit China. And shortly after that, another priest refused to receive a rosary I had brought for him blessed by the pope; he was clearly unsupportive of the Vatican’s policies toward China. An American priest friend of mine who was recently visiting China, attended an Easter Vigil Mass with thousands of attendees. The photos he sent me are astonishing. Realities of, and opinions about, the situation in China today are anything but monolithic.

Reviews are mixed, because there have been few signs that the condition of the Church in China has benefited from the Vatican’s hoped for changes brought about by the agreement. Around forty dioceses still do not have a bishop, and only nine bishops have been consecrated since 2018. China’s government is patient and persistent, and it has not obscured its aim to slowly and methodically eradicate religious belief from its cultural landscape. There is an old saying that “An ant’s hole can eventually cause a dam to collapse” (蟻穴潰堤). While Sino-Vatican agreements have been signed and renewed since 2018, China’s government consistently implements policies that weaken Catholicism. Despite the Vatican’s overtures to establish an official representative in Beijing, the state refuses the request. Among the envisaged results of the agreement was the “normalization” of the Catholic hierarchy in China, which means that all bishops are now officially recognized by the Holy See and that the so-called “underground” bishops are no longer required to operate furtively. This has, as China’s authorities hoped, brought two-thirds of China’s Catholics into open air, and the underground community is now much more vulnerable to the pressures of the government. I observe these developments having lived several years of my life in China, praying beside my fellow Catholics in pews from Hong Kong, to Taipei, to Shanghai, to Beijing. I have sat on church steps and listened to summoning stories recounting what it is like being a Christian in China, while my heart vacillates between optimism and despair.

I first lived in China when Deng Xiaoping was still in office, while the state was emerging from the hardline policies of Chairman Mao and churches were gradually reopening for worship. Deng was largely allergic to the slogan-mongering era of Mao, but during my most recent visit to the capital the long red banners of the Cultural Revolution had reappeared. After Mass one Sunday I read a prominent public banner that asserted, “Long live the great people of China! Long live the great Communist Party of China!” (偉大的中國人民萬歲！偉大的中國共產黨萬歲！) On the face of it, I would not be overly alarmed by these banners if they were not reminiscent of an era that callously repressed Christians as a “threat to Communism.” As I emerged from the Beijing subway on the same Sunday, I was yet again confronted by another banner eulogizing how socialism will “manifest a great resurgence of the Chinese people!” (實現中華民族偉大的復興！) All that was missing from this scene was a swarm of chanting Red Guards.

During the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution, Catholic churches were desecrated, demolished, or confiscated by the government for secular use. Beijing’s churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were all evacuated and reclaimed. North Church was used as a middle school, South Church became a processing factory, and West Church was repurposed as a warehouse for Chinese herbs. Crowds of mostly teenage Red Guards attacked churches throughout the country in 1966. South Church, where Matteo Ricci once lived, serves as an apt example. This elegant Baroque Christian edifice was emptied of its religious objects (statues, art, relics, tabernacle), which were heaved onto a large pile in front of the church façade and burned. A banner suspended on the church exclaimed, “Long live Chairman Mao!” (毛主席萬歲!) Priests and nuns were commanded to trample on crosses while Red Guards shouted, “Down with God!” Lian Xi describes this era with great clarity: “Throughout the country, church leaders were dragged into public ‘struggle meetings’ to be humiliated or beaten; countless were sent to ‘cowsheds’ (improvised places of confinement for the ‘ox demons’) and labor camps or driven to suicide or apostasy.”¹ China’s Catholics have not forgotten that from 1950 to 1976 Christians were persecuted and oppressed, and then the Christian community went into hiding from 1966 to 1980. The now-deceased bishop of Guiyang, Wang Chongyi, once said to me: “During Mao’s time no-one knew who was or who was not a Christian, and only God knows how many were buried then because they could not hide their faith.”

Much happened in China’s Catholic history from the era of Chairman Mao to the election of Pope Francis in 2013. Foreign missionaries were exiled during the 1950s; the so-called “Rome-independent” Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association was established in 1957; religion in China was pushed underground during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976; state- approved Christianity reemerged as a legally practiced religion during the 1980s; and Pope John Paul II canonized 120 martyrs of China on October 1, 2000, renewing tensions between political leaders and the Vatican. Many of China’s last missionaries were deported from Shanghai in 1957, marking the official end of the missionary period in China. Pope Francis is a Jesuit, and it is notable that Jesuits have been in China through all the events I just outlined. Even today members of the Society of Jesus live in China, though they do so not as missionaries. The most famous Jesuit to have lived through the Maoist era, and someone who became one of China’s most influential bishops during its Communist era, was Bishop Jin Luxian. Jin died just one month after Francis became the first Jesuit pope in the Catholic Church. I could say much about how Bishop Jin was an example of an effective Jesuit interlocutor with China’s modern government and society, but even his methods were, as he himself described them, “slippery.” Before and after the expulsion of missionaries, China’s Catholic history has largely been a Jesuit history.

In just the last few years, a spate of articles about the Vatican’s dialogue with China have appeared, each one either snubbing or supporting the Holy See’s engagement with China’s government. One dispatch in Vatican News explained that the Sino-Vatican agreement only regards “the process for the appointment of bishops,” and continues to clarify that its aim is to “permit the Catholic faithful to have bishops in full Communion with the successor of Peter.”² Another article published by the Catholic News Agency during the same year is critical of the agreement, suggesting that the Holy See should not sign an accord with a government that disallows children under the age of eighteen to attend Holy Mass, monitors church activities with state-installed cameras, imprisons clergy, and subjects the Xinjiang Muslim population to policies that have been condemned in global news sources.³ The article does, however, acknowledge Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin’s response that the goal of the agreement is “the unity of the Church,” and not to address the “many other problems that the agreement was not intended to solve.”⁴ Some Catholics in China presently wonder if the so-called ecclesial unity the Holy See envisions is worth the cost.

A Reuters article published in 2021 attempted to represent Pope Francis’ view on why he signed the 2018 and 2020 agreements. The report is entitled “Pope Defends Deal with China, Says Dialogue Necessary,” and succinctly summarizes the pope’s justification as, “an uneasy dialogue is better than no dialogue at all.”⁵ In an interview with a Spanish radio network, Pope Francis stated with equal conciseness that, “China is not easy, but I am convinced that we should not give up the dialogue.” This view of dialogue is characteristically Jesuit. Looking back into the long historical Jesuit experience of dialogue with China one can easily imagine these precise words being expressed by such missionary icons as the Jesuit, Matteo Ricci. A more recent article in The Atlantic by Francis Rocca, “The Vatican’s Gamble with Beijing Is Costing China’s Catholics,” expresses globally increasing criticisms of the Vatican’s diplomatic entanglements with China’s government. Rocca writes:

Another cost of Francis’s overtures has come in the form of his silence about China’s human-rights violations. In July 2020, amid China’s crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Francis decided not to deliver prepared remarks calling for “nonviolence, and respect for the dignity and rights of all” in the city, and voicing hope that “social life, and especially religious life, may be expressed in full and true freedom.” Vatican diplomats privately expressed puzzlement at the pope’s decision.⁶

Disputes, denunciations, and divisions continue to saturate public and private discourse about the situation of Catholicism in China. Meanwhile, China’s Catholics continue to endure their present circumstances, attending services, meeting in their homes for private prayer and study, and supporting one another in their Christian faith.

China’s Catholics are, like all people in China, people of historical memory. As I muse on this reality I am drawn to two photographs now on my desktop. The first photo image is of Fr. Cui Zhenduo, taken in 1967. The despondent priest stands with his head bowed during a Red Guard struggle session against him and his Christian faith; a massive photograph of Chairman Mao is seen looming behind him. The second photo is of a long line of Chinese Catholics processing into the Beijing cathedral for the Chrism Mass there just one month ago. Photos of the cathedral during that service are summoning; the church is crowded with nowhere to sit. One image portrays oppression, the other, freedom. I have often sat in pews in China during homilies, and Chinese clergy seem to enjoy quoting Confucius almost as often as the saints. One saying from The Analects that appeals to China’s Catholics today is, “Three armies can conquer a general, but the resolve of even a commoner cannot be taken away” (三軍可奪帥，匹夫不可奪志).

1. Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 205.
2. Andrea Tornielli, “The Holy See and China: Reasons for Agreement on Appointment of Bishops,” Vatican News, September 29, 2020, accessed June 28, 2024, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2020-09/holy-see-china-provisional-agreement-appointment-bishops.html.
3. Reports vary about where this policy is enforced. Some regions in China appear to overlook the regulation against minors attending religious services, while other areas strictly forbid anyone under eighteen entering a church.
4. Courtney Mares, “Vatican and China Renew Provisional Agreement on Appointment of Bishops,” Catholic News Agency, October 22, 2020, accessed June 28, 2024, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/46307/vatican-and-china-renew-provisional-agreement-on-appointment-of-bishops.
5. Philip Pullella, “Pope Defends Deal with China, Says Dialogue Necessary,” Reuters, September 1, 2021, accessed June 28. 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/pope-defends-deal-with-china-says-dialogue-necessary-2021-09-01/.
6. Francis X. Rocca, “The Vatican’s Gamble with Beijing Is Costing China’s Catholics,” The Atlantic, May 14, 2024, accessed June 28, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/pope-francis-catholic-church-china/678372/.