Vatican will never accept a ‘Chinese Catholicism’

A senior Vatican official has said the Holy See needs diplomatic relations with China to ensure “better co-ordination” in the country’s growing Catholic Church, but will never agree to a distinctive “Chinese Catholicism”.

“In any dialogue, you have to have a bottom line, beyond which you can’t go – however friendly and understanding things become,” said  Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai, Chinese secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples. “At certain times and places, the Pope has had to allow local rulers to nominate bishops. But that was all in the past. The vast majority of Chinese Catholics now want communion with the Holy Father and to have him choose their bishops.” The 64-year-old Hong Kong-born archbishop said China’s Church would forfeit its Catholic identity if its leaders insisted on asserting autonomy from Rome and pursuing a “so-called democratic administration”.

“Certainly, if we had diplomatic relations with China, the Church could be better organised and more coordinated,” the archbishop said. “But ... whatever those in power do, their first question now seems to be how they can best serve their own interests, rather than socialism or any common purpose.”

Speculation has continued for many years over possible ties between the Vatican and China, whose Catholic Church, estimated at 14 million, is widely believed to be most dynamic in local underground communities, rather than parishes linked with the regime-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association.

In his Tablet interview, Archbishop Hon Tai-Fai said: “Chinese Catholicism, a term used by the Communist Party in the past, isn’t Roman Catholicism – nor can those not in communion with the Pope be called Catholics.”

The archbishop and other China experts were attending a European Catholic China Colloquium, organised last weekend in Poland by Germany’s Catholic China-Zentrum and the Polish Church’s Sinicum institute.

An American professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, Richard Madsen, said he believed “no form of Christianity” would ever be fully trusted by Beijing, and the chances of its normalising relations with Rome were “not good”.