Key points in this article:

• The Pope decided to give in to China’s demands to allow the ordination of bishops in China
• For China, religion is a strategic enemy. China is infiltrating the church
• During the 1930s and 40s, Hitler’s regime had absorbed the church. Thus, the church remained silent with regard to the massacre of Jews

 
The Pope is about to bow down to China. On the 3rd, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Vatican accepted the ordination of 7 bishops chosen by the communist Beijing government.

China had severed diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1951, and ever since, the Vatican had refused to grant the Beijing government the right to ordain clergymen.

The 7 bishops chosen this time were all people who were excommunicated by the Vatican in the past, so this sequence of events means that the excommunication was nullified. Amongst these people are officials on the advisory panel of the Communist Party of China.

The irony is highlighted considering it was only last month that the local government at Shanxi demolished the Golden Lampstand Church, a megachurch built using donations from devout believers.

Vatican’s Attempt to Warm Relations Will Backfire

Why then is the Vatican trying to warm relation with China? It is said that the Vatican fears that if they do not allow China to ordain clergymen, China may start to ordain bishops on their own and threaten the spiritual relations between the Pope and the Chinese Catholics.

To warm relations with China, last December the Vatican demanded the stepdown of two bishops from China’s underground church who had pledged allegiance to the Catholic church.

The Vatican’s China-friendly stance is possibly in preparation for the recommencement of Vatican-China diplomacy and the Pope’s visit to China. Looking at the current situation in China, however, there is a higher chance that the Vatican’s advances towards China will only backfire.

Intensifying Crackdown on Christians

There are 9,000,000 to 12,000,000 Catholics in China, and there are said to be 40,000,000 to 80,000,000 Protestants. If we combine them there are more of them than the 89 million Communist Party members. In other words, Christians are a huge threat to the Communist government.

That is why the Beijing government deems all religions a “national security threat”, and the greatest threat of them all is the vastly populated Christian community. So, the government has formed various countermeasures against them.

In China, Christians who gather in unregistered house-churches and religious activities are heavily fined or arrested. After the Regulation on Religious Affairs law was instigated, people planning to study religious teachings, or to visit sacred sites overseas, require government authorisation.

In January this year, with the addition of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” in the Party constitution, religions are required to place the values of socialism at the centre of their teachings.

Their aim is to “China-fy” religion. On the surface, it looks like a strategy to erase foreign influence and protect the country from terrorism. They went as far as to choose a Communist-friendly successor to the Dalai Lama.

Catholic Church Betrayals Under Hitler

Looking back over history, the Catholic Church also betrayed its followers under the Nazi regime. Until the Nazis established one-party rule, the German Centre Party (a Catholic party) had been popular. When the Nazis began asserting racial supremacy and antisemitism, Catholics, seeing that it opposed the doctrine of the Church, rejected membership into the Nazi party.

When Nazi Germany proposed the Reichskonkordat, an agreement for the non-intervention of the Catholic church in political affairs in exchange for the protection of religious activities, the treaty was received with enthusiasm.

The Centre Party supported the Enabling Act that granted Hitler limited power to enact laws before they disbanded. This catalysed Nazism and Hitler’s rise to dictatorship in July of 1933.

When WWII began, the anti-communist Pope Pius XII turned a blind eye to the Nazis, and the Catholic church decided not to criticise the regime’s antisemitism.

Thus, the Catholic church began to betray its own doctrine, and embrace Aryan supremacy and surgical sterilization. In other words, the church turned into a Nazi-Christian church.

As British historian Ian Kershaw later commented, the Nazi’s final solution (Jewish genocide) would not have happened if church leaders had not remained silent.

Hitler Feared A Global Encirclement By The Church

Returning to the present: Chinese leader Xi Jinping has boasted that the Chinese race will rise above all others.

His strategy for the rise of the Han Chinese has many parallels with the Nazi strategy for Aryan rule. Both ideas embrace racial supremacy that champions the mass murder of ‘inferior’ races.

In truth, however, all people are children of God, and are created in his likeness: this is what the Catholic Bible teaches. Hitler feared that this teaching could become a huge threat to his plan if its believers created an encirclement network, so much so that it became one of the central themes in his autobiography “Mein Kampf”.

The current Vatican decision as reported by the Wall Street Journal, was only unofficially communicated to the Beijing government, and is planned to be enacted in the spring. It is not too late to reverse this unwise position by the Vatican.

Pope Francis must not warp the Catholic doctrine and sell the church to Xi Jinping just to warm relations.

In fact, what the Vatican must do is to follow in the steps of Pope John Paul II, who dedicatedly supported the democratization movement of Poland.

(Hanako Cho)