Vatican just kissed the ring of the CCP.
Flee it.
Vatican, China extend bishop agreement over US opposition
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican and China extended a controversial accord on bishop nominations Thursday over strong opposition from the White House and conservative Catholics given Beijing’s crackdown on religious believers.
The Holy See and Beijing government jointly announced a two-year extension to the 2018 agreement, which expired Thursday.
The Vatican justified the extension by saying the agreement was purely ecclesiastic and pastoral in nature, not political, though it noted that continued dialogue would allow for discussion on other problems, including human rights abuses.
In an unsigned article accompanying the announcement, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said the Vatican “does not fail to attract the attention of the Chinese government to encourage a more fruitful exercise of religious freedom.”
The agreement, which has never been published, envisages a process of dialogue in selecting bishops though Pope Francis has said he has the final word. The Vatican signed it in 2018 in hopes it would help unite China’s Catholics, who for seven decades have been split between those belonging to an official, state-sanctioned church and an underground church loyal to Rome.
The Vatican has defended the 2018 accord against criticism that Francis sold out the underground faithful, saying the deal was necessary to prevent an even worse schism in the Chinese church after Beijing named bishops without the pope’s consent.
The 2018 accord regularized the status of seven of these “illegitimate” bishops and brought them into full communion with the pope — a key goal of the Vatican in pushing for a deal.
The question of bishop nominations has long vexed Vatican-China relations, with the Holy See insisting on the pope’s divine right to name the successors of the apostles and Beijing considering such nominations foreign infringement on its sovereignty.
https://apnews.com/article/beijing-china-pope-francis-europe-vatican-city-5c5f822b98317f1bb5002887e383473f