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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked the agreement between China and the Vatican: If the Church would renew it, he wrote in an editorial on the magazine’s website. First things, an influential conservative religious magazine, would put his moral integrity at risk. “Two years ago, the Holy See reached an agreement with the Communist Party of China, hoping to help Catholics in China. Instead, the party’s abuses of believers have only gotten worse.. If the agreement is renewed, the Vatican puts its moral authority at risk, ”Pompeo wrote on Twitter from his official account, in a thread with which he refers to the article on First things me ask the Vatican to side with Hong Kong. “Catholics are among the voices calling most strongly for respect for human rights in Hong Kong, beginning with Martin Lee and Jimmy Lai,” the Secretary of State continued. “Beijing has arrested, spied on, harassed them for committing the crime of promoting freedom. The Vatican should be on the side of Catholics and the people of Hong Kong ”. Pompeo then reiterated that the State Department is fighting for religious freedom in China and the rest of the world, and that he hopes the Vatican can join in this fight.
A few days ago, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, spoke of “good possibilities” for a renewal of the agreement, after the approval of Pope Francis. “Our intention is for it to last, I think we continue.” adopt it ad experimentum as has been done in these two years, in order to verify its usefulness ”. The Holy See’s proposed agreement, approved by the Pope, is to renew the agreement for “at least” another two years, again on an experimental basis. As it is written here, the agreement officially referred to the “ecclesial and religious” level and not yet the diplomatic one: the question of formal relations interrupted in 1951 will be addressed, if all goes well, later. “With China, our current interest is to normalize the life of the Church as much as possible, so that the Church can live a normal life, which for the Catholic Church is also having relations with the Holy See and the Pope, and all this, of course, also in a context of peaceful coexistence, search for peace and overcoming tensions: however, our gaze is on this ecclesiastical issue, “explained Parolin.
The boundaries between the “official” church linked to the Chinese Communist Party and the “underground” church have been blurred for years in the daily reality of millions of Catholics: but while in some provinces the relations are one of coexistence, in others the situation has worsened , also due to increasingly stringent central government regulations. The regulations on religious activities, for example, prohibit minors from going to mass and participating in parish activities: in some provinces the authorities turn a blind eye, in others “the police are at the door of churches” and families are not They can enter with the children. The difficulty of the negotiations was to find a point of balance in the appointment of bishops and, therefore, in the life of the Chinese Church: on the one hand, China recognizes the Pope as head of the Catholic Church, with relative power to appoint bishops. and ultimately, have the last word. ; on the other, Beijing maintains a power of control over names. There is no lack of resistance, both in the Chinese apparatus and in the most conservative part of the Church, of which the First Things website is one of the spokesmen. Even the US administration, from the beginning, has watched the negotiations with concern – a concern that Pompeo’s intervention only makes explicit.
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