What should be Pope Leo's goals with China?
Short and medium term, small scale and big picture, there are real outcomes to shoot for.
The Vatican has announced two Chinese episcopal appointments in recent weeks, signaling the continuing operation of its eight-year-old agreement with China’s government on the appointment of bishops.
The bishops, both appointed for dioceses in the Inner Mongolia province, were publicly announced by the Vatican in the daily bolletinos for July 22 and 29, the announcements coinciding with the episcopal consecrations of Joseph Chang Yanfeng as Bishop of Chifeng and Francis Xavier Duan Yongkun as coadjutor Bishop of Bameng.
According to the Vatican, both men received papal approval for their appointments under the norms of the Vatican-China deal on June 15. The bishops’ installations are the latest in a series of relatively undramatic appointments in Vatican-China relations since Leo’s election as pope last year.
The Holy See’s accord with China continues to draw criticism from some quarters, with commentators noting Beijing’s track record of violating the deal’s provisions — often publicly and with impunity — and the continuing crackdown on the exercise of basic religious freedoms on the mainland. But, with the deal set to run for another two years, it is clear the current system of appointments will continue for some time yet.
After more than a year in office and with a modest slate of mainland appointments seen through, Pope Leo has had time to gauge the internal workings of the Holy See’s deal with the Chinese Communist Party. With that under his belt, what could be the scope of the pope’s ambitions for improving the Church’s lot in and with China?
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The dual July announcements represent, on one level, a continuation of a kind of progress for the Vatican-China deal under Leo, inasmuch as there seems to be a superficial smoothness to the processing of Chinese episcopal appointments.
Both bishops were selected within the CCP-affiliated internal structures of the Church in China and, at least according to the Vatican’s public statements, subsequently presented for formal papal approval — which was granted — before receiving episcopal consecration.
That may seem like small beer in the grand scheme of creating a healthy Chinese ecclesiology, but in the immediate context of the Vatican-China deal’s life cycle since 2018, it has to be considered a kind of victory.
The previous status quo, in which the Communist-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association appeared to appoint bishops at will, with or without a papal mandate, was in many respects worse than the situation before the deal was first agreed. At least in the prior situation there was clarity of status between the schismatic state-sponsored church and the Underground Church in communion with Rome and an obvious distinction between those bishops who were in union with the pope and those who were not. Under Pope Francis, there was essentially no clarity about what was being done licitly on the mainland and what was not, with the Vatican often clearly left in the morally untenable position of having to pretend appointments made without any Roman involvement were pre-approved.
Since Leo’s election, Beijing has appeared much more cooperative and respectful of the essential procedural norms of papal approval. The July announcements appear to be a continuation of that shift, with both citing a common June day for the approval of both bishops, which were separately announced on the days of their consecrations.
However, each new mainland appointment continues to be met with a predictable (and not necessarily unreasonable, given recent history) chorus of reflexive criticism and the assumption that every new bishop represents a kind of Roman capitulation to the Chinese government.
At the same time, it is worth noting that, unlike with previous rounds of Chinese appointments, neither of the two new bishops has been portrayed in the media as obviously aligned with either the CPCA or the underground Church, and both have served in pastoral and curial ministry in their dioceses for some years. This may be a reflection of the Church in China becoming — and becoming understood as — less starkly bifurcated than it once was between “pro-Rome” and “pro-Beijing” bishops.
The emergence in China of a more complex body of bishops has been one of the more tangible but least quantifiable outcomes of the Vatican-China deal. Last summer, the Vatican announced the appointment of formerly underground Bishop Joseph Lin Yuntuan as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Fuzhou.
The general reception of that appointment at the time focused on Lin’s background and service for years as a clandestine bishop serving the Underground Church. His nomination to serve in an official capacity of the Fuzhou archdiocese was hailed as a kind of triumph for the Vatican in its ongoing power struggle with Beijing. However, as The Pillar reported at the time, the crucial factor in Lin’s appointment from the mainland perspective was the vocal support of the Archbishop Joseph Cai Bingrui, who was installed as head of the archdiocese earlier that year, and who championed Lin’s acceptance by the CPCA.
As sources on the mainland explained to The Pillar, Cai’s status as a CPCA bishop did not mean he was hostile to Rome or formerly underground bishops, and that episcopal relationships on the mainland were often much more nuanced than commonly appreciated from outside.
However, if the Chinese episcopate is becoming less divided internally, and it is the case that at least some candidates for dioceses can now be found who are actually mutually acceptable to Beijing and Rome, the Vatican still faces a baseline level of skepticism around the China deal — reasonably so, given the history of CPCA unilateral action and years of deafening Roman silence on globally prominent human rights abuses in the country.
One obvious way to dial back the popular cynicism about the entire idea of sincere Vatican-China cooperation on bishops would be to simply bring the announcement of new appointments in line with other similar episcopal nominations everywhere else in the Church.
If, as the Vatican’s own public statements have consistently claimed for some time, Chinese nominations for bishops are receiving papal approval weeks, or even months in advance of their consecrations, it would seem perfectly reasonable, and would be a presumably effortless and cost-free change, to announce them as the approvals are granted, instead of the current system of acknowledging the new bishops only on the day they are installed.
Apart from representing a healthy normalization, this would also be a genuine “proof of life” from the Vatican in its otherwise undisclosed dealings with the Chinese authorities — the ability to announce and acknowledge new bishops weeks ahead of their installations would be a genuine sign that the appointment process is happening as claimed.
As long as new installations are merely acknowledged in real time, though, there will be a sizable body of opinion which holds, or at least is open to the possibility, that the Vatican remains totally sidelined by the CCP and has merely become more efficient at presenting the appearance of involvement.
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If there is scope to tighten up Vatican communications around Chinese appointments in the immediate term, though, Leo is no doubt giving some thought to the bigger picture of Vatican-China relations.
With two years left to run on the deal in its current form, the pope will, one expects, want to see some changes made to the agreement which has been renewed on a pro-forma basis every two years since its signing in 2018, with a four-year extension being granted in 2024.
Given the years of obvious problems under Pope Francis, even assuming a relatively smooth two years of appointments from now until October of 2028, many will continue to call for a wholesale revisiting of the terms of the deal, and even a flat out withdrawal from it.
At the same time, while the leadership of Xi Jinping sees unlikely to change or change course between now and then, it can be reasonably predicted that by 2028 Leo will have overseen a complete turnover in the leadership of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, ushering out the old guard responsible for and most invested in the 2018 deal.
The extent to which the pope brings in new thinking along with new faces, and allows for candid expressions of China-skepticism at the top of the Holy See’s diplomatic tree, could do much to shape how bullish Rome is in approaching any renewal or renegotiation.
However, even assuming that Leo’s key advisors are willing to take and advise a more realistic assessment of the current deal’s merits, there remain some hard realities they will have to think around. It remains the case that walking away from the Vatican-China deal might be a decisive public statement about the state of religious freedom in China, but it would create enormous and immediate pressures on Chinese Catholics, and likely create another schism between the state and underground churches.
At the level of the hierarchy, this would mean bishops who have been trying to pick a careful path between state tolerance and communion with Rome would be effectively forced to choose sides, and suffer the consequences. For ordinary Catholics who remained loyal to the pope, it would mean a return to outlaw status.
Another approach to negotiations with China might, conversely, be to try to broaden its scope in the hope of winning special protections or exemptions for Catholics from state repression of religious practice. While that might strike some as a fanciful aim, it isn’t exactly true to say that the Vatican has no bargaining power, or Beijing no interest in changes to the status quo.
Over the course of the Vatican-China deal’s life-cycle thus far, episcopal appointments have been complicated by the government’s overt desire to redraw the diocesan map of the mainland, overwriting and carving up the Church-recognized dioceses which have existed since the 1940s.
China continues to press ahead with changes to the episcopal map, not out of overt antagonism to the Holy See, but because of an insistence that ecclesiastical boundaries be coterminous with civil provincial areas. At the same time, the government has shown a clear willingness to act unilaterally when Rome has been slow to agree to changes over recent years, the result of which is to undermine the entire goal of the Vatican-China deal and create a commonly recognized Church in China.
The epicopal appointments in July represent, in this context, a kind of mixed compromise, with Bishop Joseph Chang Yanfeng being installed to lead the Vatican-created Diocese of Chifeng, and Francis Xavier Duan Yongkun as coadjutor Bishop of Bameng — a jurisdiction created by the state in the 1980s and until now only informally recognized by Rome.
If a new iteration of the Vatican-China deal is to emerge by 2028, the agreement of a new set of diocesan boundaries and episcopal sees would, arguably, be a major win for both sides — it is worth noting that even the Vatican approved jurisdictions as they currently exist are not always distinct in their territories and are the sometimes confused results of decades of appointments and erections of dioceses, mission territories, and apostolic prefectures, sometime from more than a century ago.
For such a project to come off, though, the Vatican would have to be prepared to think big and bold in its dealings with China, and willing play a real hand at the diplomatic table to win some protections for local Catholics in addition to structural coherence.
Of course, all that presupposes that the Vatican’s role and leverage in the current deal is alive, if not always well. Establishing that for all to see remains the immediate challenge for the Holy See.