Lord David Alton of Liverpool, a prominent member of the House of Lords in the UK, recently condemned the 2018 provisional agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a “deal with the devil,” highlighting its complicity in “gross violations” of religious freedom and its resultant betrayal of the underground Church in the nation.
“In the case of the Chinese Communist regime, it is making a deal with the devil—a regime that has committed genocide against Uyghur Muslims and persecutes Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners, and Chinese Christians,” Alton said.
The provisional deal between the Holy See and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose details remain undisclosed, concerns a possible integration with the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA). The CCPA was established in 1957 under the orders of Mao Zedong and is managed by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, aiming to align Catholicism with communist ideology. By early 1958, Beijing had illegally appointed its initial group of bishops without the Holy See’s consultation. In June of that year, Pope Pius XII released his encyclical Ad Apostolorum Principis, in which he denounced China’s “parallel” Church and refused to acknowledge any episcopal consecrations conducted by the CCPA without prior Vatican approval. From the information available, it can also be inferred that this agreement reinforces the CCP’s supreme authority to appoint bishops and to dissolve or establish dioceses in China—the Pope merely endorses the Party’s decisions.
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