Jason Scott Jones, a Christian, is upset by something that doesn’t bother me, the willingness of Pope Francis to accept blessings of same-sex couples, which “has stunned and traumatized serious believers around the world.” But Jones and I are on the same page when it comes to papal muteness about atrocities committed by the Chinese government.
In a December 21, 2023 piece for The Stream, Jones writes that “much as I’m upset about what the Vatican did, I’m even more appalled by what it wouldn’t do.”
This Vatican will not speak a word about the savage, ongoing persecutions waged by the Chinese Communist government, especially of religious believers (both Christians and Uyghur Muslims). Indeed, as The Stream reported, when it emerged…that China was raking in millions each year by selling organs cut from the living bodies of these prisoners of conscience, Pope Francis wasn’t just silent. He sent his right-hand man, Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, to speak at a conference of the regime’s organ harvesters, to praise their work and China’s regime….
Pope Francis has said nothing about [the] outrageous persecution [of Jimmy Lai], just as he has said nothing and done nothing about the imprisonment of more than one million Uyghurs in concentration camps.
The Stream’s ultimate source for the detail that Bishop Sorondo attended a conference in China explicitly about organ transplantation seems to be a December 2019 story in Global Times:
Speaking at an organ donation and transplantation conference held in Kunming, capital of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province over the weekend, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said “Pope Francis has love and confidence in China; and China trusts Pope Francis.”
“In this dynamic, the next step is to reach [an agreement on establishing] diplomatic relations,” and especially the visit of Pope Francis to China and China’s leaders to visit the Pope as friends when the time is right.
The bishop said that this is at the center of the heart of Pope Francis.
Global Times is an organ of the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore to be generally distrusted.
But two years earlier, in 2017, The Guardian observed that Vatican officials were defending “their decision to invite a Chinese former deputy health minister to a conference on organ trafficking despite concerns that China still relies on the organs of executed prisoners in its transplant programme,” which critics said “risked giving a propaganda boost to China and an ‘air of legitimacy’ to its transplantation programme.”
Yes, there’s always the risk when you play into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party that the CCP will benefit.
In 2020, The New York Times reported that the Vatican was renewing a deal that “ended a decades-old power struggle over the right to appoint bishops in China, despite concerns over religious liberty and human rights in the country. The deal calls for China to formally recognize the pope’s authority within the Roman Catholic Church and his final say over the country’s bishops. The Vatican in turn recognized the legitimacy of bishops previously appointed by the Chinese government and excommunicated by the church.”
The provisions of the concord did not stipulate that the Chinese government must now stop persecuting Uyghurs, Christians, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, dissidents, and others or stop ripping out the organs of living persons. Of course, the Vatican could not have imposed any such requirements. So why was it negotiating with and making deals with the Chinese government to begin with?
Two years later, the world learned that China had violated its pact with the Vatican about bishops in China. The Vatican expressed “surprise and regret.” Surprise?
