ROME (AP) — The Vatican made another major overture to China on Tuesday, reaffirming that the country poses no threat to Beijing’s sovereignty and admitting that Western Catholic missionaries have made “mistakes” in their zeal over the past centuries to convert the Chinese believers.
The Vatican hosted the head of the Chinese bishops’ conference for an unprecedented high-level commemoration of a historic 1924 meeting that affirmed that foreign missionaries in China must make way for local leaders of the Catholic Church.
The presence of the Bishop of Shanghai Joseph Shen Bin next to the Vatican Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, at the Pontifical Urbaniana University was remarkable in itself. It was the first time in history that a bishop from mainland Beijing was allowed to participate as the keynote speaker at a public Vatican event.
It was also significant given the controversy over Shen’s 2023 appointment. Pope Francis was forced in July to recognize China’s unilateral appointment of Shen as Bishop of Shanghai. The appointment apparently violated the Holy See’s 2018 agreement with Beijing on the appointment of bishops.
Francis opened the conference with a video message in which he made no mention of recent troubles, instead pointing to the 1924 meeting in Shanghai as a turning point for Vatican-China relations. The first and only Chinese church council, he said, recognized that the church in China “must increasingly have a Chinese face.”
“But the Shanghai Council did not only serve to forget the erroneous approaches that prevailed in previous times,” Francis said. “The participants of the first Chinese Council looked to the future. And their future is our present.”
It was a reference to the French, Italian and other Western missionary religious orders that evangelized China over the centuries but refused to cede leadership authority to the local Chinese clergy. Their attitude helped fuel the anti-Western and anti-Christian sentiment behind the Boxer Rebellion, which aimed to rid China of foreign influence.
The Vatican has been working for years to improve relations with China, which were officially severed more than seventy years ago when the communists came to power. The aim is to unite the country’s estimated 12 million Catholics, who were divided into an official, state-recognized church and an underground church that remained loyal to Rome.
Relations had long been hampered by China’s insistence on its exclusive right to appoint bishops as a matter of national sovereignty, while the Vatican continued to insist on the pope’s exclusive right to appoint the successors of the original apostles.
The 2018 deal tried to find a middle ground, though the Vatican has noted repeated violations and Rome has acknowledged it was a bad deal but the only one it could get. It was signed at a time when China was tightening controls on all religions, especially Christianity and Islam, which are seen as foreign imports and potential challengers to communist authority.
