After 1958 official Catholics began ordaining their own bishops without Vatican approval. Vatican loyalists countered by holding underground services of their own, starting a bitter rivalry between the two factions. One of the prickliest issues is whether Beijing or the pope has ultimate authority to ordain bishops, control finances, allow abortions and decide other key church matters. Relations between China and the Vatican hit a low point last year when the Holy See canonized dozens of Chinese saints on Oct. 1, National Day in China, without consulting Beijing. The Chinese government was enraged.
The Vatican has its own long list of grievances. During the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), extremist Red Guards persecuted and tortured Catholics of all stripes. But since then only clandestine Roman Catholics, devoted to the pope, have suffered. Over the years, thousands have been harassed, detained and imprisoned by Chinese authorities. In the past year dozens of underground churches have been demolished. Just last month, around Easter, six underground clerics were arrested, mostly in Hebei province. One of them, the Most Rev. Shi Enxiang, 79, has already spent nearly 30 years behind bars for his loyalty to Rome.
In short, Beijing and the Vatican got along very badly for the last half of the 20th century. But now, once again, the tumultuous relationship has begun to turn. As if by historical momentum, “official” and “unofficial” Catholic churches throughout much of China have begun informally to merge in recent years. So while the seats of church and state are still feuding, nearly all of China’s 70 official bishops actually have been approved by both Beijing and the Holy See. “This is a new and dramatic development,” says Ren Yanli, a prominent Beijing scholar on Catholicism. If the two sides agree on bishops, even informally, they can hope for further normalization in the future–even re-establishing diplomatic relations, which both sides say they genuinely want. John Kamm, a San Francisco-based human-rights activist, says that in most Chinese regions nowadays, official Catholics and clandestine Catholics “follow a ’live and let live’ policy.” In some congregations, they even worship together. For the estimated 5 million underground Catholics in China–more than half the country’s total number–that is effectively a victory in the fight for religious freedom.
A half century of animosity between Beijing and the Vatican will not quickly dissipate. But the Chinese government has practical reasons for moving toward reconciliation. Improved relations with the Vatican would promote the idea that China is committed to human rights. That might take some of the sting out of China’s hostile relations with Tibet’s Dalai Lama and drive a wedge between Catholics and followers of the banned, quasi-mystical Falun Gong sect. Not incidentally, it would improve China’s chances to win the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games in this summer’s vote. “A perception of more religious freedom would vastly improve Beijing’s image in the West, especially the United States,” says Kamm.
The political calculations don’t stop there. The Vatican is one of just 28 governments to recognize Taiwan–and a rapprochement between Rome and Beijing would cost Taipei its embassy in the Holy See.
The Vatican has its own motivations. After normalization, Chinese Catholic leaders would be able to abandon their internecine squabbles and devote more energy to ministering to the flock. To the dismay of Rome, the Beijing-Vatican rift has stunted the growth of the Catholic community. Before 1949 Chinese Catholics far outnumbered Protestants. But now the reverse is true. There are now about 20 million Protestants in China–twice the number of Catholics.
Beijing knows that Catholics, like other religious groups, do good work in the country. A consortium of 24 Jesuit universities in the United States recently created a joint M.B.A. program with Beijing University, under which graduates receive degrees from Fordham University. Chinese Catholics–including clandestine ones–set a selfless moral example in a country that, for all its money worship, is attempting to develop institutions to improve justice and attack poverty. Churches and abbeys have already contributed. Earlier this year a group of Vincentian nuns traveled to Inner Mongolia to distribute relief goods during a drought.
In the dusty town of Donglu in Hebei province, an order of nuns founded by the late Belgian Rev. Vincent Lebbe has set up a community health clinic. During a recent visit, an awkward 15-year-old slouches into the clinic, complaining of itchy eyes. A chirpy young nun examines the boy and gives him an injection of antibiotics for suspected conjunctivitis. She claims the kids in Donglu have bad eyes because “they watch too much TV.” Although the young nun is an official Catholic, she says that “underground priests and nuns come here often to visit. We have different opinions, but we all have the same faith.”
Such togetherness is becoming commonplace. In one northern Chinese city, an underground Catholic priest now lives in the patriotic bishop’s Gothic residence, sits alongside the bishop at meals and conducts mass for clandestine Catholics in an unmarked chapel on official church grounds. Such a “cohabitation” would have been unthinkable until recently. “Chinese authorities have tried to remove the underground priest many times, but the official bishop won’t allow it,” says a Catholic cleric familiar with the arrangement. What’s more, the official Catholic bishop has been recognized by the Vatican; he even consulted with the pope in Lourdes during a 1990s trip to Europe.
Tensions are still apparent. The rivalry between China’s patriotic church and its clandestine Catholics was grim and bitter for decades, replete with the Machiavellian intrigue one might expect from two of the world’s most opaque institutions–the Vatican and the Politburo. Agents for both factions spied on one other, and competed for converts.
Sympathetic foreign Catholics donate impressive amounts of money to official and especially clandestine churches. But the prospect of normalization has already triggered disputes over who will control such assets. The Vatican still opposes several patriotic church leaders–including one bishop who is married–and it would demand that they be ousted before a formal reconciliation. China still has 10 sensitive dioceses, where clandestine Catholics “feel the full force of the religious-control system,” as Kamm put it. That normally means the underground clerics are watched and frequently detained in places like Hebei, Shaanxi and parts of Fujian and Zhejiang provinces.
After normalization, all believers would be treated equally under guidelines hammered out between Beijing and the Vatican. But for the moment, in theory, the two Catholic factions cannot merge entirely. Official Catholics are required to register with the government, and many underground Catholics still refuse to set foot in patriotic churches. But in recent years the Vatican has hit upon a strategy for co-opting the patriotic church and enhancing its influence. Many patriotic bishops want to be recognized by the Vatican, and it has increasingly given them its secret blessing. Such clerics covertly accept papal leadership–but they know how to live by Beijing’s rules and try to avoid trouble. In this way the Vatican can bring not just the cleric but his entire following under the papal umbrella. For the most part Beijing has adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach. “That’s the new trend: to have an official church like ours follow the Roman Catholic Church,” boasts a chubby, thirtysomething priest in a Shaanxi province village where the population is 70 percent Catholic. Though he studied at an official seminary, the priest listens to Vatican Radio daily and networks with underground clerics from all over the country. “Churches like ours are the biggest threat to the patriotic church. It’s losing control of its own people.”
Starting in the 1980s during Deng Xiaoping’s reformist regime, Chinese bishops began sending letters to Rome via trusted intermediaries (often visiting foreign clerics), asking for the Vatican’s imprimatur. (A Chinese bishop can ordain a priest as a bishop if the decision has been cleared by the Vatican.) If accepted, the new bishops receive written notification of papal approval. The papal edict is a treasured document, to say the least. “We all have documents from the Vatican, but we don’t say so aloud,” confesses one elderly bishop who spent 25 years in a labor reform camp in western China. “I was helped by a Belgian priest.”
Within the hard-line church, bishops can pray for the pope–but they’re not supposed to have direct contact or accept Vatican decisions when they clash with Beijing’s. But these days such taboos are fading. One of the first Chinese clerics to make the pilgrimage to Rome was the Rev. John Xie, from Xinjiang. He was ordained as a bishop by the Vatican in 1991–but in the eyes of Beijing, he says, “I’m only considered a priest.” With the help of Western clerics, he traveled to Rome in 1994 and met the pontiff. “I am [mainland] China’s first bishop to meet the pope,” the septuagenarian told a recent visitor, dusting off a framed photograph of the meeting. Upon his return home, he faxed the cherished photo of him with the pope to churches and seminaries all over China. That didn’t go over well with the official leadership, and he was forced to submit to lengthy “political study” sessions afterward.
According to an Asia-based Roman Catholic priest who has traveled to China more than 100 times, the Vatican is trying to signal to Beijing that “we need not be so cat-and-mouse with each other.” NEWSWEEK has learned that the Holy See, in an attempt to hasten normalization, has recommended to Beijing a post-normalization formula for ordaining bishops. It is based on similar discussions held with Eastern European governments and Vietnam during the Vatican’s 1980s initiatives in Ostpolitik. Based on a concordat, or agreement between both sides, the patriotic church would suggest three candidates for ordination, and after consultation with relevant clerics the Vatican would choose one to become a bishop. Beijing has not responded to the proposal.
Chinese authorities claim they have been keen to normalize relations with the Vatican since the ’80s. Yet each time a breakthrough seems imminent, some misstep halts the process. Hopes were high on both sides in 1999 when the Holy See’s secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, declared the Vatican ready to switch its embassy to Beijing “overnight”–if full normalization were guaranteed to follow. But late that year Roman Catholics were alarmed when a classified Chinese Communist Party document was obtained by the Vatican’s missionary news service, Fides. While anticipating normalization, the secret policy paper advocated a harsh crackdown on clandestine Chinese Catholics because the Vatican would try to “take advantage of normalization” to enhance papal authority. “It proved the official church doesn’t want to absorb the underground church, it wants to get rid of it,” Fides director Bernado Cerverella told NEWSWEEK. Or as Fides put it in an editorial, “This confirms the almost spasmodic interest of China in relations with the Holy See, but also confirms the obtuseness of the regime.”
Things got worse in January 2000 when Beijing abruptly ordained five bishops without papal approval. The unilateral move upset the Vatican. It also upset many official Chinese Catholics who balked at toeing the party line. More than 130 teachers and students of the prestigious National Seminary in Beijing boycotted the ceremony. That embarrassed Beijing and prompted the transfer of the seminary head. “People felt the ordinations shouldn’t take place before normalization,” says Guo Jincai at the seminary. “We no longer talk about aboveground or underground Catholics. We all pray normalization will come quickly.” (The new seminary head is a respected bishop from Qingdao who, unlike his predecessor, has been recognized by the Vatican.)
Last year following that dispute, both Beijing and the Vatican engaged in low-key ordinations that had a distinct tit-for-tat flavor about them. But they were soon eclipsed by an even more explosive controversy–the Vatican’s canonization, on Oct. 1, of 87 Chinese and 33 foreign martyrs. For Chinese Catholics it was a signal event–the first time ethnic Chinese were declared saints. But Beijing’s patriotic church leaders were livid. On the eve of the ceremony, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray visited China and said mass in Shanghai. But his Chinese hosts complained bitterly about not only the timing of the canonization, on China’s National Day, but also about the event itself. Many of the martyrs had died at the hands of xenophobic rebels during the 1900 Boxer uprising, which Chinese history books now consider a “correct anti-imperialist movement.” The Foreign Ministry accused the Vatican of “distorting history” and canonizing “monstrous criminals” who had engaged in rape, looting, adultery, usury and antiques smuggling.
A source within the Vatican acknowledges that the timing of the ceremony was “a dumb mistake. No offense was intended.” According to this source, “there was a breakdown in communications within the Vatican.” The church’s Jubilee 2000 committee, headed by the Most Rev. Crescenzio Sepe, hastily set the date before getting a go-ahead from the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Says a Vatican monsignor: “State knew Oct. 1 was an important day in the history of modern China, but Sepe’s office didn’t. Once the significance dawned, it was too late to make a change without making it appear that the Vatican was succumbing to Chinese pressure.”
Such diplomatic wrangling doesn’t mean much in Hebei province, where one fourth of China’s Catholics live, many of them clandestine believers. There, entire villages have switched en masse from official to clandestine status once their clerics have received the Vatican’s blessing. But the government offers harsh treatment to papal loyalists who never went “official.” A handful of the most senior members of China’s underground church, including the Most Rev. Su Zhimin, live in Hebei. Some are almost always either in hiding or under some form of detention. “They’re constantly being picked up, held for a time, then released, held again, then released,” says Kamm. “They sometimes stay in sort of ‘religious old-age homes’,” due to their advanced age. Last August security personnel detained one clandestine bishop, the Most Rev. Wang Chonglin, and kept him in a three-star hotel for political-study sessions and theology lectures. Such propaganda is intended to persuade underground clerics–many of them poorly educated and out of touch with Vatican II reforms such as the participation of the laity and the switch from Latin to indigenous languages–to go official.
Not far from Wang’s diocese, an earnest young priest is holding Palm Sunday mass for hundreds of official believers. From over a tall wall wafts the familiar sound of praying: next door, in a large workshop with a dirt floor, another thousand or so clandestine Catholics are holding their Palm Sunday service. Their presence is hardly secret. The service features an odd sort of orchestra, with people dressed in bright green, Western-style suits playing drums and trumpets during holy communion. On the official side of the wall, the patriotic priest seems slightly embarrassed by the schism but unapologetic. “We’re all siblings,” he says. “Some families in the village have members who worship in our church and other members in the underground church. We belong together.” The people understand that, and so increasingly do the institutions of governance in the Holy See and Beijing. Normalization may not be imminent, but the two sides are now looking each other in the eye.
