A year earlier, on October 1, 2000, John Paul II had beatified 120 Chinese martyrs at St. Peter’s Square. And the Chinese authorities had protested stridently, as if this beatification had been an offense to the Chinese people, all the more so because it had been celebrated on one of their national holidays.
But in the John Paul II message cited above, there isn’t even a single line in defense of the beatification of those martyrs.
Nor are there any references to the persecutions that continued to afflict Christians in China; nor to the massacre, over recent decades, of countless bishops, priests, and faithful; nor to the incarcerations; nor to the torture and forced labor; nor to the systematic violation of basic rights of liberty.
It was entirely the opposite. It was John Paul II who asked for “forgiveness and understanding” for the “errors” committed in China by the Church. In the pope’s text, the formulation of these errors paralleles almost exactly the accusations systematically charged against the Vatican by Beijing, including the charge of its having been at the service of hostile “foreign powers.”
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One leading proponent of this accommodating stance toward China on the part of the Vatican has been cardinal Roger Etchegaray, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
Curiously, Etchegaray published a book of memoirs on his visits to China and his meetings with Chinese authorities in March of 2005, precisely when this “realist” politics was coming to an end.
Recounting one of his trips, which he made in 2000, after the contested beatification of the 120 Chinese martyrs, Etchegaray wrote that he had undergone two consecutive “interrogations,” lasting a total of four and a half hours, carried out by two “very highly placed” officials. He said nothing during the interrogations. Instead, after returning to Rome, in an interview with Vatican Radio he described as “highly displeasing the canonization’s coinciding with the national holiday of the Chinese people. This deeply wounded their sensibilities, which are so delicate after all the humiliations they have suffered from the Western powers.”
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