{"id":2267,"date":"2006-05-09T09:43:25","date_gmt":"2006-05-09T09:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/whats-up-with-china.html"},"modified":"2006-05-09T09:43:25","modified_gmt":"2006-05-09T09:43:25","slug":"whats-up-with-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/whats-up-with-china.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s Up With China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magister’s take:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

A year earlier, on October 1, 2000, John Paul II had beatified 120 Chinese martyrs at St. Peter\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

But in the John Paul II message cited above, there isn\u2019t even a single line in defense of the beatification of those martyrs. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

It was entirely the opposite. It was John Paul II who asked for \u201cforgiveness and understanding\u201d for the \u201cerrors\u201d committed in China by the Church. In the pope\u2019s 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 \u201cforeign powers.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\n
\n

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. <\/p>\n

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 \u201crealist\u201d politics was coming to an end. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cinterrogations,\u201d lasting a total of four and a half hours, carried out by two \u201cvery highly placed\u201d officials. He said nothing during the interrogations. Instead, after returning to Rome, in an interview with Vatican Radio he described as \u201chighly displeasing the canonization\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magister’s take: A year earlier, on October 1, 2000, John Paul II had beatified 120 Chinese martyrs at St. Peter\u2019s 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.…<\/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-2267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat's Up With China - 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\/05\/whats-up-with-china.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What's Up With China - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Magister’s take: A year earlier, on October 1, 2000, John Paul II had beatified 120 Chinese martyrs at St. Peter\u2019s Square. 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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\/2267","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=2267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}