POMPEO WARNS POPE ON CHINA CONCORDAT
by Jules Gomes • ChurchMilitant.com •
September 21, 2020
Sino-Vatican deal compared to treaty with Third Reich
WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is warning Pope Francis that the Vatican risks endangering its moral authority if it renews its controversial secret deal with China.
"No regime suppresses faith on a larger scale than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)," Pompeo announced Sunday, after urging the Vatican to "stand with fellow Catholics and the people of Hong Kong" in a tweet Saturday.
The Twitter outburst from Pompeo's government account follows his strongly-worded column published Friday in the journal First Things, arguing that "now more than ever, the Chinese people need the Vatican's moral witness and authority in support of China's religious believers."
"The Holy See has a unique capacity and duty to focus the world's attention on human rights violations, especially those perpetrated by totalitarian regimes like Beijing's," Pompeo asserted, noting that the "same power of moral witness" that inspired the fight against 20th-century communist and authoritarian regimes "should be deployed today with respect to the Chinese Communist Party."
"Two years on, it's clear that the Sino-Vatican agreement has not shielded Catholics from the Party's depredations, to say nothing of the Party's horrific treatment of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong devotees and other religious believers," Pompeo noted.
Faith Being Subverted
The CCP's "decades-long war on faith" against Catholic clergy, laity and Protestant house churches are all "parts of a 'Sinicization' campaign to subordinate God to the Party while promoting [China's president] Xi [Jinping] himself as an ultramontane deity," Pompeo observed.
The secretary lamented that "Communist authorities continue to shutter churches, spy on and harass the faithful and insist that the Party is the ultimate authority in religious affairs."
Vatican diplomats meet this month to renew the 2018 concordat, which, he said:
legitimized priests and bishops whose loyalties remain unclear, confusing Chinese Catholics who had always trusted the Church. Many refuse to worship in state-sanctioned places of worship, for fear that by revealing themselves as faithful Catholics they will suffer the same abuses that they witness other believers suffer at the hands of the Chinese authorities' increasingly aggressive atheism.
The secretary also pointed out that "Hong Kong's most prominent voices for human dignity and human rights have often been Catholics." He named "father of democracy" Martin Lee and media baron Jimmy Lai, who "have been arrested, spied on and harassed for the simple 'crime' of advocating the basic freedoms" promised by Beijing "in exchange for regaining sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997."
More at link:
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/pompeo-warns-pope-dont-renew-china-deal
More confirmation concerning the Vatican-China 2 year deal
signed in 2018 which is to be renewed very soon.
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