{"id":1018,"date":"2006-06-18T00:40:41","date_gmt":"2006-06-18T00:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/our-chinese-relations.html"},"modified":"2006-06-18T00:40:41","modified_gmt":"2006-06-18T00:40:41","slug":"our-chinese-relations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/our-chinese-relations.html","title":{"rendered":"Our Chinese Relations"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Times UK offers a backgrounder – with some new information – on what’s been going on between the Vatican and the PRC over the past few months:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Zen said the persecution of Catholics in China had moved the Vatican to try to reach an accord that would relieve the suffering of believers. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a very optimistic feeling after the death of Pope John Paul II and the installation of the new pope,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

The Italian government was approached to grant visas to cadres from China\u2019s Religious Affairs Bureau and from the state security apparatus. <\/p>\n

Silvio Berlusconi, then the prime minister, approved. The delegation was whisked to Rome, then, on the instructions of Pope Benedict XVI, invited into the inner sanctum of the church\u2019s city-state. \u201cThey were received very kindly and given a privileged tour of the Vatican and of the Sistine chapel one Sunday,\u201d said Zen. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

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Within months, senior clergy in Rome were talking of a grand bargain that would see the Vatican transfer its embassy from Taipei to Beijing and a cordial agreement with China allowing Catholics to profess obedience to the Pope. <\/p>\n

However, as the secret diplomacy unfolded, it caused panic among the legions of Chinese officials whose power and status depend on the continued existence of a state bureaucracy to control religion. <\/p>\n

It posed a direct threat to the so-called Patriotic Association, set up on orders from Mao Tse-tung in the 1950s as the only permitted national church for Chinese Catholics. <\/p>\n

Anthony Liu Bainian, its vice-chairman, denounced Zen as \u201ctoo involved in political affairs\u201d, a reference to the cardinal\u2019s defence of democracy and support for commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, performed each year in the safety of Hong Kong. <\/p>\n

Liu warned Chinese leaders that allowing the Pope to appoint bishops would lead to the church becoming the vanguard of anti-communist dissent as it did in Poland. <\/p>\n

The three ordinations in defiance of Rome thus served as a definitive statement of the party\u2019s resolve. Zen believes they were pushed through by Liu and his bureaucrats with the reluctant consent of the leadership. He says there is evidence the clergymen were coerced into going through the rituals. <\/p>\n

Since then the Chinese position has hardened. Xinhua, the state news agency, said the development of Catholicism in China \u201ccalled for the self-selection and ordination of bishops\u201d. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Times UK offers a backgrounder – with some new information – on what’s been going on between the Vatican and the PRC over the past few months: Zen said the persecution of Catholics in China had moved the Vatican to try to reach an accord that would relieve the suffering of believers. \u201cThere was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOur Chinese Relations - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/our-chinese-relations.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our Chinese Relations - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}