PopeWatch: China

The Vatican sell out to the Chinese communists continues on its predictable way.  Sandro Magister gives us the latest:

The Chinese regime is also applying its agreement with the Holy See this way. With the bulldozer that under police escort – see photo – razes to the ground on April 4 the building of a parish in Qianyang, which had on its top floor a room for the Mass and on the ground floor a free clinic for the poor, run by nuns.

The fault of the pastor and of the two thousand faithful of this “clandestine” parish is the same as that of the diocese of which it is part, that of Fengxiang, in Shaanxi, the only diocese in all of China in which none of the baptized, from the bishop to the last of the faithful, has yet agreed to enroll in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the main instrument with which the regime subjects the Church to itself in the name of its “independence” from Rome that Benedict XVI defined as “irreconcilable” with Catholic doctrine, in the 2007 letter to Chinese Catholics still declared valid by his successor.

But it’s not only the material destruction of this as of many other buildings of the Catholic Church. What is more serious is the systematic suffocation of that big portion of the Church which does not have official recognition from the Chinese government, but also does not want to submit to the blackmail of being admitted to legality only if it agrees to enroll in the Patriotic Association.

The case of the diocese of Mindong, in Fujan, is perhaps the most instructive, if one wants to understand how the Beijing authorities are putting into practice the secret agreement signed last September 22 with the Holy See.

Curiously, precisely the diocese of Mindong is the one that a year ago had been indicated as the “stress test” for the good success of the agreement between the Holy See and China, in an article by Gianni Valente, the expert on Vatican affairs most read and cited by Pope Francis.

But to judge by what is happening there today, this diocese is instead the “test” not of the agreement’s success, but of its failure.

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Easter is drawing near, but the bishop who currently plays the role of auxiliary in the diocese of Mindong, Vincent Guo Xijin, is at serious risk of being blocked from celebrating both the Chrism Mass, on the morning of Holy Thursday, and the liturgies of the subsequent Triduum.

Last year as well Guo was blocked from celebrating the Paschal rites. And the same in 2017, when just before Holy Week he was arrested by the police, to reappear twenty days later.

Over the past two years, the punishment had been imposed over his refusal to celebrate the rites of Easter together with the excommunicated government-appointed bishop Vincent Zhan Silu, installed by the communist regime in his same diocese.

But then on September 22 2018 came the agreement between the Holy See and China on the appointment of bishops, and Rome not only revoked Zhan’s excommunication, but it convinced Guo to give up the leadership of the diocese to him, accepting for himself the role of a simple auxiliary, in spite of the fact that in Mindong there is a big disproportion between the “clandestine” Church to which Guo still belongs, 80,000 faithful strong, 57 priests, 200 nuns, 300 consecrated laity, hundreds of catechists, and the “official” Church of the formerly excommunicated Zhan, with a few thousand faithful and a dozen priests.

To set up in this way, entirely to the advantage of the Chinese regime, the structure of the diocese of Mindong, there went from Rome to China, in December of 2017 and then again in December of 2018, one of the Vatican diplomats most experienced in the matter, Claudio Maria Celli.

The first time Guo resisted, but the second time he said yes. To obtain his obedience, Celli told him that it was Pope Francis himself who was asking him for this “sacrifice for the unity of the Chinese Church.”

Go here to read the rest.  Heckuva job Conclave of 2013, heckuva job.