In a small church tucked into a side street in northern China’s Hebei province, a group of around 10 people gathered for their weekly meeting, the day after Pope Francis died aged 88.
The Vatican on Monday announced the death of the Argentine pontiff, who inspired devotion but riled traditionalists during his 12-year tenure.
In 1951, newly communist China severed ties with the Holy See, forcing Catholics to choose between membership in the state-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association or non-sanctioned churches loyal to the pope.
Photo: AFP
But under Francis, China and the Vatican signed a 2018 agreement allowing both Beijing and the Holy See a say in appointing bishops in an attempt to close the schism in China’s 12-million-strong Catholic community.
On Tuesday grieving worshipers sang and prayed together in the small Hebei sanctuary where portraits of biblical figures adorned the walls and a hanging sculpture of Jesus on the cross faced a dozen rows of pews.
A transparent glass bookshelf displaying Chinese Communist Party texts and writings of President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood adjacent to a depiction of the Last Supper.
The pope’s death felt “just like the pain of losing a loved one,” said one church member who asked to be identified as Chenxing.
“He taught us... to have love for one another,” the 53-year-old said, adding that Francis had always hoped for peace, and prayed especially for places still at war.
Others who gathered said they were “shocked” to hear of his death because it “seemed so sudden” — especially after he had made an appearance at the Vatican the previous day, Easter Sunday.
FUTURE OF AGREEMENT
The Vatican and China do not have formal diplomatic relations, as the city-state recognizes Taiwan while Beijing claims the nation as its own territory.
Despite this, Pope Francis was credited by experts with improving relations between the Vatican and China in recent years.
During his tenure, Francis played a “key role” in reframing and resetting dialogue with Beijing, said Michel Chambon, an expert on Christianity in Asia and a research fellow at the National University of Singapore.
“For the first time, the Chinese government recognized that a foreign power, the pope, has the right to say something when it comes to the administration of Chinese Catholics,” Chambon said.
For many Chinese believers the agreement was “a big, big deal,” said a lifelong attendee of an underground church in northern Inner Mongolia.
The man, surnamed Wu, credits Francis with helping create “a state of unity” between China’s above-ground and underground Catholics.
“He was always quietly praying for the Church in China,” said the 36-year-old. “We felt that we had not been forgotten.”
The deal — whose text has never been made public — has drawn mixed reactions from within the Catholic Church. Some see it as allowing the Communist government to tighten its grip on the country’s Catholics while others applaud it as a step towards closer ties with the Vatican. As Francis sought to make inroads for the Church in China, it was renewed in 2020, 2022 and last year — most recently for a four-year term.
“Will the next pope have such a temporary agreement?” asked Wu.
‘FAITH HAS NO NATIONALITY’
China will be one of the major issues discussed by the cardinal electors at the conclave to select Francis’s successor, said Paul Mariani, a Jesuit priest and professor of history at Santa Clara University.
The future of the deal, and relations between the Vatican and Beijing, remain uncertain, experts said.
“The next pope is definitely free to do whatever he wishes with the provisional agreement,” Mariani said.
“The fact is that it could be changed at will as it is not a matter of doctrine.”
China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom and Catholicism is recognized by the state.
However, rights groups say religious organizations face routine persecution and that freedom to worship is severely curtailed — a trend they say has worsened under Xi.
The Vatican “compromised much” to secure the agreement while the ruling Communist Party “took it as a victory for effectively reducing the underground church,” said Fenggang Yang, the director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University.
“Nowadays, the underground Catholic practice is much more costly,” he said.
The underground church is not trying to stoke division, Inner Mongolia’s Wu said.
“We just want to pursue an orthodox and pure belief,” he added. And Chenxing, the Hebei churchgoer, rejected the view that Catholicism was rooted in foreign influence.
“Only people who don’t know Him think He is Western,” she said, referring to Jesus Christ. Standing quietly nearby, fellow lifelong believer Jingtu agreed.
“Faith has no nationality,” the farmer said.
Google unveiled an artificial intelligence tool Wednesday that its scientists said would help unravel the mysteries of the human genome — and could one day lead to new treatments for diseases. The deep learning model AlphaGenome was hailed by outside researchers as a “breakthrough” that would let scientists study and even simulate the roots of difficult-to-treat genetic diseases. While the first complete map of the human genome in 2003 “gave us the book of life, reading it remained a challenge,” Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told journalists. “We have the text,” he said, which is a sequence of
On a harsh winter afternoon last month, 2,000 protesters marched and chanted slogans such as “CCP out” and “Korea for Koreans” in Seoul’s popular Gangnam District. Participants — mostly students — wore caps printed with the Chinese characters for “exterminate communism” (滅共) and held banners reading “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communist Party” (天滅中共). During the march, Park Jun-young, the leader of the protest organizer “Free University,” a conservative youth movement, who was on a hunger strike, collapsed after delivering a speech in sub-zero temperatures and was later hospitalized. Several protesters shaved their heads at the end of the demonstration. A
Every now and then, even hardcore hikers like to sleep in, leave the heavy gear at home and just enjoy a relaxed half-day stroll in the mountains: no cold, no steep uphills, no pressure to walk a certain distance in a day. In the winter, the mild climate and lower elevations of the forests in Taiwan’s far south offer a number of easy escapes like this. A prime example is the river above Mudan Reservoir (牡丹水庫): with shallow water, gentle current, abundant wildlife and a complete lack of tourists, this walk is accessible to nearly everyone but still feels quite remote.
In August of 1949 American journalist Darrell Berrigan toured occupied Formosa and on Aug. 13 published “Should We Grab Formosa?” in the Saturday Evening Post. Berrigan, cataloguing the numerous horrors of corruption and looting the occupying Republic of China (ROC) was inflicting on the locals, advocated outright annexation of Taiwan by the US. He contended the islanders would welcome that. Berrigan also observed that the islanders were planning another revolt, and wrote of their “island nationalism.” The US position on Taiwan was well known there, and islanders, he said, had told him of US official statements that Taiwan had not
RSS