Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to push the Vatican to use its “moral authority” in diplomatic negotiations that the papal state has planned with China.
Pompeo, who has recently taken strong stances against China’s human rights abuses, said that the Vatican, through Pope Francis’s leadership of the Catholic Church, is in a unique position to speak out about the communist regime.
“The church has an enormous amount of moral authority, and we want to encourage them to use that moral authority, to improve the conditions for believers, certainly Catholic believers, but believers of all faiths inside of China,” Pompeo told the Catholic News Agency ahead of a trip to Rome this week.
Pompeo is expected to protest the extension of a deal that the Vatican plans to sign with China in October. In an opinion article published this month in the conservative journal First Things, Pompeo wrote that the deal, which normalized relationships between the two states, “has not shielded Catholics from the Party’s depredations, to say nothing of the Party’s horrific treatment of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong devotees, and other religious believers.”
“What the Church teaches the world about religious freedom and solidarity should now be forcefully and persistently conveyed by the Vatican in the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless efforts to bend all religious communities to the will of the Party and its totalitarian program,” Pompeo wrote.
When posting the piece on Twitter, Pompeo said that the Vatican “endangers its moral authority” if it should renew the deal.
In July, a cybersecurity watchdog found that Chinese hackers broke into Vatican computers prior to the negotiations. Among those targeted were the offices of the Holy See’s Study Mission in Hong Kong, leading many to speculate that the hack was an information-gathering mission for the diplomatic talks.
