The Vatican announced a deal with the Chinese government recently that lifts excommunication on Chinese government-appointed bishops, recognizes them as valid, allows the government to nominate all future bishops, and requires that a number of Vatican-appointed bishops whom the government had forced underground to discontinue their ministry. In return, Beijing agrees to recognize the Pope as head of the Catholic Church.
In the abstract, a deal with an oppressive regime isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the Church. But it’s not clear how this one improves the situation for Chinese Catholics. The government has been cracking down as hard as ever on religious practice, stripping churches of Christian imagery and banning children from entering. State-approved churches replace religious teaching with state propaganda in hopes of “Sinicizing” religion.
The deal does not put a stop to any of this. And while persecuted Catholics have often benefited from leaders willing to stand up to hostile regimes, if the Xi government has any say in appointing bishops, it’s unlikely that Chinese Catholics will get their own Oscar Romero or Karol Wojtyla anytime soon.
George Weigel, who has written about the past century of sloppy Vatican diplomacy, observed that the Rome-Beijing agreement came on the 85th anniversary of a Vatican concordat with Nazi Germany. But the Vatican’s history of bad deals with dictators stretches even further back, at least to the 1801 Concordat between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII. The Concordat allowed Napoleon to nominate bishops, put them on government payroll, and retain all Church property that the revolutionary government had seized. And in return? Napoleon agreed to recognize that most Frenchmen were Catholic.
That prior historical event points us, if a bit indirectly, to the message that last week’s Beijing deal sends. The 1801 Concordat ensured that the Church would stay entangled with all the vicissitudes of 19th-century French politics. That century of strange relations created the environment for new ideas about church and state, including one that’s back on the table today: integralism.
Integralism is the principle that church and state should pursue the same ends. Traditionally, this meant that the state should be deployed in the business of saving souls, the logic being that the church knows best (or better than the secular state) what people truly need, and that everything should ultimately aim at citizens’ highest spiritual good. Practically, the term’s been used to describe everything from outright theocracy to mere advocacy for Catholic social teaching in the context of existing government and civic institutions.
The term gets tossed around today more as a pejorative than as an actual descriptor. Pope Francis’s most vocal supporters have (usually, if not always unfairly) painted Catholic traditionalists in the West as integralists of an extreme variety. But the Beijing deal represents a different kind of integralism, one of which the Papacy seems to approve, and that (whatever one’s opinion of traditionalist integralism) is clearly worse. This second integralism ties together the goals of church and state, but it hands the reins to the latter. It aligns the church with prevailing cultural and political projects for social justice. Adherents don’t always bother to hide their allegiances— Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo of Rome’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences made headlines in Catholic media for referring to China as “the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine,” specifically on environmental policy.
These new integralists seem to be perfectly fine with church-state entanglement when it means signing on unreservedly to what they see as progressive policy. Another example, far less extreme but no less influential, comes from Germany, where the ecclesial hierarchy benefits from revenues of a 9-percent state tax on Church members. German bishops, unsurprisingly, tend to align with the cosmopolitan preferences of their state. They’re notorious for theological liberalism and cultural progressivism, pushing for the Church to change long-standing positions on issues like divorce. And they’re consistently among the most vocal critics of conservative Catholics in the West.
The Vatican’s Beijing deal sends, then, a dual message. First, the Church is telling persecuted Chinese Catholics that its obligation to ensure their well-being and provide them good leaders is less important than its relationship with the Chinese state. Second, it’s telling traditionally-minded western Catholics that the Vatican is more willing to work with the most oppressive regime in the world—even to the point of contradicting its stated preferences for religious freedom and against church-state entanglement—than it is with them.
