China: Control of Catholics Under the Pretext of Inculturation

2024 should be a decisive year, according to what is known about the secret agreement between China and the Vatican. Signed for the first time in 2018 for a duration two years, this agreement has been renewed twice for the same period, but it is expected that it must be ratified definitively this year or abandoned.

In 2023, after a clear violation of the agreement on the Chinese side, there were three “normalized” bishop appointments. However, no one knows the details of the criteria which guide the government in the choice of bishops. Furthermore, neither the Pope nor the agreement are mentioned in China when the appointments are announced.

This plan, explains Asianews, which is “very detailed and divided into four parts and 33 paragraphs, was approved on December 14, 2023, by the official body that unites the Conference of Catholic Bishops (not recognized by the Holy See) and the Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics (APCC),” both operated under the supervision of the United Front, the CCP office.

The “Catholic” five-year plan never mentions the Pope and the Holy See, nor the agreement between the Vatican and China. But Xi Jinping is mentioned four times. “Five times it is reiterated that Catholicism must take on ‘Chinese characteristics.’ The word sinicization reigns supreme: it occurs 53 times.”

It uses the usual language: “It is necessary to intensify research to give theological foundation to the sinicization of Catholicism, to continuously improve the system of sinicized theological thought, to build a solid theoretical basis for the sinicization of Catholicism, so that it constantly manifests itself with Chinese characteristics.”

Fr. Gianni Criveller, who writes for Asianews, notes “the firmness and peremptoriness of the language” and expressed surprise: it is “as if there had been no dialogue and no rapprochement with the Holy See; as if the Pope’s recognition of all Chinese bishops counted for nothing; as if there were no agreement between the Holy See and China.” 

He adds his dismayed astonishment, “I am impressed by the project of giving a theological foundation to sinicization.” However, we should not “mistake this term as a stage in the legitimate ecclesial process of inculturation… here there are no believers here who freely seek a virtuous dialogue between the Catholic faith and their own cultural belongings.”

“Rather, it is about imposition and, by an authoritarian regime, of the adaptation of the practice of faith to the religious policy established by the political authorities.” Once again, how could it be otherwise with a Communist Party buried more than ever in an atheistic and manipulative doctrine?

Fr. Criveller concludes his article: “What we believe is unacceptable is that the control by political authorities over Catholic believers – a control that they would like to pass off as sinicization – is conveniently and ambiguously justified in the name of the inculturation of the Gospel.”