In 1996, a tiny village with a huge Gothic-style church in China’s Catholic heartland of Hebei Province was the scene of a tense standoff between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the faithful.
Authorities surrounded Donglu village’s Our Lady of China Catholic Church, blocking thousands of pilgrims and detaining Vatican-ordained Bishop Su Zhimin (蘇志民), who was a member of the “underground” Church, not the state-backed official Church which did not recognize the pope’s authority to name bishops.
Despite repeated appeals to Chinese authorities from Vatican officials and underground clergy, it is unclear whether Su, who would now be 86, is still being held or is even alive.
Decades on, the Donglu church’s ties with officials are now convivial, according to Diao Ligang, a local priest, reflecting a generational shift toward acceptance of the party’s authority over China’s Catholics.
“Before, it was as if they kept wanting to see what we were hiding in our fist,” Diao said. “But then we opened it and they realized there was nothing dangerous in there in the first place.”
Last month’s secretive deal with the Vatican, which gives the Holy See a long-sought and decisive say over the appointment of new bishops, sets the stage for Beijing to recognize some underground congregations. Details of how and when this process might happen have not been released.
Interviews with five underground priests and two dozen believers in Hebei suggest previously stark divisions between underground Catholics loyal to the Vatican and churches officially registered with the Chinese authorities have blurred in recent years.
The coming together reflects growing, if grudging, acceptance of government oversight by the faithful, as the Vatican pushes for a reconciliation with Beijing and many of the older generation that had expressed staunch opposition to the party are either silenced or dead.
Still, Cardinal Joseph Zen (陳日君), 86, the outspoken former archbishop of Hong Kong, has led an international chorus of conservative critics who say the deal is a sellout to the party and an insult to those who had suffered under oppression.
He and other opponents of the secretive deal warn the expected gradual folding of unofficial churches into a government system of control risks abandoning a group of “loyalist” bishops and priests, who for decades resisted joining the Catholic Patriotic Association, as the state-backed church is known, and have been punished as a result.
China says there are 6 million Catholics in the country, across 98 officially approved dioceses.
The Holy Spirit Study Centre, run by the diocese of Hong Kong, estimates that there are 10 million believers spread over 144 dioceses.
Such discrepancies have been the subject of closed-door negotiations for more than a decade between Beijing and the Vatican, which wants to preserve and expand the Catholic community in China.
The Vatican went ahead with the provisional deal, despite it failing to address some outstanding points of contention, because it feared the two churches would split even further apart, resulting in a schism that would become irreparable, Vatican sources said.
At four recent services attended by journalists, three official and one at an “underground” church, there was little that was discernibly different between those at churches loyal to Beijing or the Vatican.
Donglu is now run under the leadership of Bishop An Shuxi (安樹新), who had been an “underground” coadjutor bishop alongside Su, meaning he had been granted right of succession by the Vatican.
An was also detained in the 1996 crackdown, but reappeared a decade later, and in 2009 announced he had joined the Patriotic Association. In 2010, he became the officially recognized bishop of Baoding diocese, where Donglu is located.
An declined to be interviewed when contacted by reporters, citing health problems.
For Diao, An’s experience and that of the local church in Donglu represents hope for an end to the divisions that have riven the church in China since Beijing in 1951 cut ties with the Vatican and banished its diplomatic mission.
“These divisions are made by people who want to say they have more faith than others,” Diao said during an interview in Donglu church, built in 1992 to replace the original shrine destroyed by Japanese bombers during World War II.
“If people have faith, then they have faith. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t also follow the law,” he said.
The church remains one of China’s most important Catholic pilgrimage sites and thousands travel there every May to celebrate a claimed miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary in 1900.
A depiction of Our Lady of China and the Baby Jesus, a painted image of a Chinese woman holding a baby, both dressed in the yellow imperial robes of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China until 1912, hangs in the church.
Since 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has overseen a tightening of restrictions on religious belief in China, with Muslims and Christians being targeted most.
Regular weekend classes and week-long summer camps for children at one church had been canceled by the authorities over the summer, one underground priest from a village near Zhangjiakou in Hebei said, declining to be named for fear of retribution from the authorities.
In light of the Vatican deal, he preached patience and acceptance of government restrictions.
“I told my parishioners, this is not about the millions of us who already believe; it is about those who do not yet believe. We must have the foresight to think about how to let them find faith,” he said.
The deal between Beijing and the Vatican was struck without resolution of some long-held church concerns over clerics in detention, Catholic Church sources familiar with the substance of the deal have said.
As part of the deal, the Vatican approved seven excommunicated Patriotic Association bishops ordained without church approval, meaning all Beijing-approved Bishops have now been accepted by the Holy See.
It is unclear what, if any, immediate change the deal made for Beijing’s attitude toward China’s approximately 30 underground bishops, whose uncertain fate could still scupper the accord, said Yang Fenggang (楊風崗), a professor at Purdue University in Indiana, who specializes in religion in China.
“This is a baby step and the relationship looks very fragile,” he said.
However, the Holy See’s acceptance of government-backed bishops had already started to blur the lines, as more bishops were seen as both Vatican and Beijing-approved, he added.
Wang Meixiu (王美秀), an expert on China-Vatican relations at the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said for the agreement to move forward the pope would have to call for unofficial churches to “abandon former hatred” and be good citizens.
“The eyes of the government are still on those churches that have not registered and those underground clerics that have not been approved,” she said.
Additional reporting by Stella Qiu
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US