Pope Pius XII did business with the Nazis. The current pope, Pope Francis, does business with the Chinese Communist Party. To what end? Not for the sake of promoting the institutions or doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church or of protecting Catholics.
We don’t know what the Vatican is getting out of its recently renewed compact with the CCP. The details of the agreement, which governs administration of dioceses and the appointment of bishops, are secret. The answer may be, probably is, that the Vatican is getting nothing; that it is simply assisting, whatever protests to the contrary it might make, in the suppression of Catholicism and Catholics in China.
The papacy renewed its “landmark” agreement with China for another four years on October 22, 2024, after being blindsided by the CCP’s unilateral appointment of a bishop, so-called, in Shanghai, one Bishop Shen Bin.
For Bitter Winter, He Yuyan reports (November 19, 2024):
On April 4, 2023, Bishop Shen Bin, until then Bishop of Haimen, was installed by the CCP as the new Bishop of Shanghai. The Vatican declared officially that “the Holy See learned from the media of the installation” only the morning it happened….
On July 15, the Holy See announced Pope Francis had appointed Shen Bin as Bishop of Shanghai, transferring him from Haimen. Notably, Shen Bin had already been installed by the CCP over three months earlier. The Vatican stated it had “rectified a canonical irregularity” for “the greater good of the diocese.”
The new bishop kept a low profile for several months. Then he told Catholics of the Shanghai Diocese his thoughts and plans at a seminar held from November 4 to November 6, 2024 on the subject of “Sinicization of Religion in Shanghai.”
Catholics who attended the seminar told Bitter Winter that the bishop did not discuss at all the Vatican synod or Pope Francis and his recent documents. On the contrary, he focused on “Sinicization,” which, as it is now clear, does not mean adapting religion to Chinese customs but to the CCP’s ideology. An optimist could object that Bishop Shen Bin did not explicitly tell Shanghai Catholics “not” to listen to the Pope’s teachings, which oppose the CCP’s ideas on key matters such as abortion and the role of religion in society. But for a bishop to ignore the Pope and his documents in such solemn events is tantamount to rejecting them….
Bishop Shen Bin is promising to bring the good news of the Gospel to Catholics in Shanghai. But it is the Gospel of Xi Jinping.
The only question, if any, is why there had been any doubt about the matter. If the Chinese Communist Party had intended to stay out of the way of the the policies and doctrines of the Catholic Church as practiced and promulgated in China, the Party would have stayed out of the way.
Also see:
Vanity Fair: “Hitler’s Pope“
“Pope Pius XII helped Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition.”
Reason: “The Pope Who Helped Bring Down Communism“
” ‘I have no doubt,’ Polish President Lech Wałęsa once said, that without John Paul II ‘the birth of Solidarity would not have been possible.’ ”
