Skip to content
LPBN-Icon-v1 (1)
The Right Coast
A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network

Chairman Xi Gets a Seat at the Pope s Table – WSJ

By Thomas A. Smith

Of the 368 participants in this month s Synod on Synodality, 272 are bishops. They are a remarkable cross-section of humanity, demonstrating that the Catholic Church is the most multicultural religious community in the world. Amid that diversity, two attendees stand out in a singular way: Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu of the Diocese of Funing/Mindong and Bishop Joseph Yang Yongqiang of the Diocese of Hangzhou hail from China, where an often brutal effort is under way to Sinicize religious communities, bringing them into conformity with Xi Jinping Thought.

The Chinese regime assigned Bishop Zhan Silu to his diocese in 2000. The bishop incurred excommunication for accepting consecration as a bishop without papal approval, a grave ecclesiastical crime. He was subsequently reconciled to the church in 2018 but a year later publicly vowed to carry out the Sinicization of religion with determination and continue to follow a path that conforms to socialist society.

Bishop Yang Yongqiang is vice president of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a tool of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, created in 1957 to split the Catholic Church. The Vatican has never recognized the group as a legitimate Catholic organ. In a letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI said its purposes are incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Bishop Yang s position in the CCPA further deepens the gulf between the regime-controlled church in China and the sorely beset underground church, which has remained loyal to Rome even as its clergy and laity are jailed or martyred.

Why, then, are these two men, whose ultimate loyalties are unclear, spending October in Rome at the personal invitation of Pope Francis? The modern history of Vatican diplomacy suggests an answer.

via www.wsj.com

George Weigel, who must have Vatican sources equal to anyone’s.

I suspect the PRC “donates” a vast amount of money to the Vatican. That, combined with the ideological affinities with Pope Francis and his cronies with Xi, assures him more than a seat or two at the alarming Synod on Synodality. It’s not St. Pope John Paul II’s church anymore. But you know whose church it really is, right? Remember that. That’s what LWJ says, anyway.