ROME – The Vatican on Saturday doubled its goal of continuing discussion with China about the appointments of bishops, protecting an agreement it reached with the Chinese government in 2018 as obligatory for the life of the Catholic Church there, despite strong American objections.
The Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, gave the Holy See’s maximum reliable and complete response to the complaint of the protracted agreement in a speech that marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival in China of Catholic missionaries of an Italian order.
Parolin insisted that popes as far away as Pius XII had attempted to reopen a discussion track with Beijing after the Communists forcibly arrived and foreign missionaries were expelled, and showed that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had approved the draft of agreement that the Vatican Pope Francis despite everything signed in 2018.
Parolin’s statement that Benedict XVI had approved the assignment aims to silence some of Francis’ conservative critics, many of whom are nostalgic for Benedict XVI’s conservative papacy and have used the Chinese agreement to undermine Francis.
The Vatican will expand the agreement with China, which provides for a discussion procedure on the variety of bishops, signed it in 2018 in the hope that it will help unite Chinese Catholics, who for seven decades have been divided among those belonging to an official and state-sanctioned church and an unwavering underground church with Rome.
The factor of bishops’ appointments has long angered relations between the Vatican and China, with the Holy See insisting on the Pope’s divine right to appoint the successors of the apostles, and Beijing seeing appointments as a foreign violation of their sovereignty.
The Vatican defended the 2018 agreement opposed to the complaint that Francis sold the clandestine faithful, saying that the agreement was obligatory to prevent him from a worse schism in the Chinese church after China appointed bishops without the Pope’s consent.
“Benedict XVI approved the draft agreement on the appointment of bishops in China which was only in 2018 that it was imaginable to sign,” said Parolin, who added that the agreement only covers the appointment of bishops and has no effect in any way. in other facets of church life in China, let alone on political issues.
He called it a “starting point” and said he values extending it because two years is too short an era to assess its value.
“There have been some results, but for the discussion to have more consistent results, it must continue,” he said. “On the holy see side, there is a preference to extend the agreement experimentally, as has been done. done, in order to determine its use. “
It was the third time this week that Parolin had to protect the agreement, after a tense stopover at the Vatican through U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a speech on devout freedom in Rome and in a written essay before his arrival, Pompeo made transparent American objections to the agreement and suggested the Vatican join the United States in denouncing China’s crackdown on ethnic minorities and , adding Catholics.
“This is not about the United States as opposed to China. This is tyranny,” Pompeo told reporters on his way back from Croatia on Friday, at the end of a holiday in Europe to check the strict line of Europe and the United States on Beijing. that accelerated amid the coronavirus pandemic and before the November 3 election.
In his Saturday address, Parolin took the opportunity to recognize the “imperialist” mistakes of some Catholic missionaries operated in the afterlife and even the Holy See’s own resolve to first name only non-Chinese bishops, a clear nod to decades of Chinese grievances about foreign interference through the Church.
Parolin speaking at the Milan headquarters of the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions, a devout order that sent Italian missionaries to mainland China in 1870. All foreign missionaries were expelled and diplomatic relations with the Holy See were cut off after the Chinese communists came here to force the 1950s.
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