The Catholic Herald this week carried an interesting story about the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Church — a very controversial and confusing entity whose precise status has long been officially ambiguous. The story itself contains the hints as to why this is the case, and why ongoing negotiations over this church’s status will be quite important:
One of China’s top leaders has told Chinese Catholics that they need to promote socialism and patriotism through religion and operate “independently” of non-Chinese authorities.
Yu Zhengsheng’s speech came at the end of a meeting of China’s official Catholic church that was being closely watched by the Holy See. Yu is one of seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body. His speech could be a measure of how much Beijing is willing to yield in potential dialogue with the Holy See.
Yu called on Catholics to take decisions independently from Rome, saying: “The Church should adhere to the principles of self-administration, run religious affairs independently and guide believers to adhere to the Sinicisation path of the religion.”
When you hear this sort of anti-Catholic diktat arising from a tyrannical government’s committee meeting, you can perhaps appreciate why practicing Catholics in the U.S. would find repulsive any discussions about funding a “Catholic Spring” that would subvert church authority to suit the prevailing whims of one time or place. It’s an attack on the very “catholicity” or universality of their religion.
At any given moment, a Catholic mass is being said somewhere in the world, whether it’s attended by Filipinos, Chinese, Irishmen, Chileans, Kenyans or Canadians. Until recently, people in all those and a hundred other countries even heard the mass in the same language. And part of that universality is the fact that the teachings are the same wherever you go. Catholics in many countries have suffered or died to maintain that universality, or at least to assert it, against brutally imposed secular authority. (The feast of Saint Thomas Becket was just observed on Thursday.) So to give up that universal character voluntarily to suit one country’s or one era’s popular opinion is … well, a very ridiculous idea.
Catholics in China live under some pretty harrowing and confusing circumstances. The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association is the only “Catholic” church that Chinese are allowed to join legally. (There is also an illegal underground church in full communion with Rome.) The Vatican doesn’t recognize its authority, but it does accept the validity of the CPCA’s clergy and its sacraments, just as it does with some other schismatic churches.
But its status is still more complicated than that. The state forbids certain Catholic teachings that impugn its tyrannical rule (on abortion, for example) and now and then appoints bishops to the CPCA against the Vatican’s wishes. Then again, nearly all of those bishops (but not all) have turned around and declared loyalty to Rome and received its permission for their ordinations. The result is a bit of a muddle, and it can be very hard to tell what’s what.
Beginning in the 1990s, the Vatican (not without controversy) adopted a prudential policy of trying incrementally to pull the CPCA’s Catholics into the fold rather than just write off their entire church and cut off millions of Catholics. But with statements like the one above, the Chinese state keeps asserting its control, making the confusing balancing act a lot harder to maintain.
It’s a sobering reminder of what an important thing religious freedom really is, and why it needs protection, both in this country and internationally.
