The Pope’s big bet on China
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Pope Francis arrived in East Timor earlier today and was greeted rapturously and somewhat incredibly by literally half the country. 600,000 people went to mass. The people's pope is on a 12-day four-country daunt through Asia, despite being 87 and in frail health.

Well, I think one reason, actually, is to show that he can do it. He wants to show that he's still kicking. But it's not just that Lolo Kiko has something to prove. The Catholic Church in Asia is doing something that you could argue is a modern-day miracle.

It's growing. What's more, this trip will bring Papa Pancho geographically closer to a country he longs to visit, but cannot. China. Coming up on Today Explained, the Pope in Asia.

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He explains.

I'm Noelle King. There are 153 million Catholics in Asia. That's a big number, but it's a big continent, and Catholics are still a minority. The Vatican is very interested in Asia because, unlike Europe and Latin America, where Catholicism is on the decline, the religion is actually growing in Asia. To explain the Pope's trip, we called Francis X. Rocca. He's a journalist who's covered the Vatican since 2007.

Francis has taken five trips to East Asia and Southeast Asia. He's visited eight countries prior to this trip. John Paul II, who went practically everywhere he could in the world, went to all these countries. But Benedict XVI, Francis' immediate predecessor, didn't make any trips to East Asia or Southeast Asia. So, yeah, let's say that, you know, Benedict was very, very focused on Europe. Francis has focused on the rest of the world and certainly on Asia, among other places.

He has visited already, he's left now, Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world. So that's a natural place for him to pursue again his outreach to building bridges with the Muslim world. I encourage you to sow seeds of love.

Confidently tread the path of dialogue. Continue to show your goodness and kindness. Papua New Guinea. Pope Francis has traveled to the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. He's brought a ton of medicine. That's a country which has been hit very hard by climate change. The rising sea levels threaten the atolls there.

Well, the Pope addressed political and religious leaders yesterday, and he touched on a number of issues, including climate change and the need for sustainable use of Papua New Guinea's natural resources. Timor-Leste or East Timor is a very Catholic country. It's almost 96 or 97 percent Catholic, and I believe it's considered the most Catholic country in the world, perhaps except Vatican City.

Now during his speech earlier, Pope Francis also urged Timorese to tap on their faith and the gospel's teachings to resolve new challenges such as education, poverty, gang violence. I think he'll also, it's quite likely he'll talk about reconciliation because they have a 25-year occupation by Indonesia. Peaceful reconciliation after war, civil war is a theme that not only this pope, but you know, popes like to encourage.

And then finally, he'll be going to stop being in Singapore, which is kind of an interesting case. I mean, Singapore is a city state like the Atacan City, of course, is very different, but it's a very wealthy country. It's one of the Asian tiger economies. The Pope has talked a lot about the challenges of inequality and social justice. He's criticized market capitalism. So maybe that's a theme that he will want to highlight there.

What do we know about what the reception has been like in Asia? Anything interesting of note? Well, in Indonesia, it was very good. For the mass in the stadium there, they way went over the expected numbers. I believe it was 100,000 was the figure given in attendance. You know, for a country that's only 3% Catholic, I mean, that's pretty good. And they had overflow attendance. And there was a touching scene with the Grand Imam of the principal mosque there who, you know, kissed the Pope on the head and the Pope kissed his hand.

Welcome, welcome

Earlier, Catholics and Muslims gathered near the Istiklal Mosque, where Pope Francis participated in an interfaith meeting. Of course, this is an honour in itself, because we're not a majority Catholic country. We're a country with the largest Muslim majority in the world, but we were chosen for the Pope to come here. So this, you know, is a sort of iconic image of what the Pope likes to call human fraternity of, you know,

peaceful coexistence, more than that with, you know, with the Muslim world. He and the Grand Imam signed a declaration calling for, again, you know, repudiating violence in the name of religion and working against climate change. There's been a lot of talk about the one country, the one big country where Francis is not going, and that is China. Why are we hearing so much about a country that he's not visiting?

Well, I mean, China is the big, you know, John Paul would have loved to go to China and to Russia. China and Russia are the two big targets that neither one has been able to go to. No pope has gone. Yeah, in Russia's case, it's because, primarily because the Russian Orthodox Church is very wary of Rome, always has been, and so that's a big hurdle. But in the case of China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, will...

is very wary of letting in a foreign leader of a church that operates in their own, in their own territory. That would be a big ask and would probably take some big concessions by, uh,

But the Vatican, especially, above all, I think, cutting off diplomatic relations, which the Vatican has with Taiwan. The Vatican is one of the few states that still has relations with Taiwan. It would have to get rid of those, first of all. And even then, I think the Chinese would be very, very wary. The Pope himself would go to China tomorrow if he could. Would I like to go to China? Absolutely. I'd go tomorrow. Are there Catholics? Are there many Catholics in China?

Yeah, the number, we don't have an official number, but around 10 million, maybe a little bit more. They're divided between still an underground church, so-called underground church that refuses to register with the government authorities and resists government control, and kind of an official church that is...

very closely supervised by the government. And that's been a big bone of contention with the Vatican since very shortly after the Chinese Revolution in 1949. How does the official church operate and how does the underground church operate? For the approved religions...

which include Protestant Christianity and Islam and some others, they have actual bureaucracies. They choose leaders. They approve everything of any importance that goes on. That's something that a lot of Catholics have resisted and rejected. The Vatican has been not very happy about. But under this pope, it has become reconciled to that and has in fact encouraged increasingly –

the underground Catholics to register and in effect join the official church so that there'd be one church, not two. They're very worried about schism and also to improve relations with the Chinese. And part of that effort, in 2018, the Vatican signed an agreement with the Chinese agreeing that neither side would appoint bishops without agreement of the other.

Many people see the landmark accord as highly significant for China's Catholics. This is a big thing. For China, it means we will be able to accept teachings from the Vatican.

So all the bishops that have been named are both officially recognized by the Chinese government and by the Vatican. So the pro is that the church's hierarchy is unified. The con for many people is that the Chinese government and the Communist Party can exclude anyone who doesn't meet its criteria as a bishop.

So this 2018 deal, is everyone okay with it? Is this sort of how things will proceed from now on, do you think? Well, in fact, it was a temporary deal, and it's up for renewal next month in October. The indications are that the Vatican wants to renew it, and I believe the Chinese do as well. So we can assume that it will be renewed at least for another two years.

The Vatican has not hidden its frustration. Only a few bishops have been named. Nine bishops have been named since the agreement was signed. And the Chinese have used the agreement to increase the pressure on the underground Catholics to join. Many of them say, at least privately, that they feel betrayed. The rapprochement between the Vatican and China under Pope Francis has come at a cost. And part of that is that

the Catholic Church in China has had to accept the policy of sinicization, or so-called "Chinification," which is, in principle, making the teachings and the practices of the Catholic Church and of other religions and of other aspects of society, for that matter, compatible with Chinese culture. But in fact, it goes beyond that and has to do with the teachings and the ideology of the Communist Party of China.

The Chinese Catholic Bishops' Conference, which, by the way, is a body not recognized by the Vatican. It's officially controlled by the government there. But in its constitution says that the Bishops' Conference supports the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist system, and adheres to the principles of independence and self-governance, which means, in other words, not being run by Rome. That's in the constitution of the Bishops' Conference.

So you can see to what extent cynicization, which is a policy that Xi Jinping has pushed very much over the last 10 years, you can see how that subordinates the Catholic Church and other religious groups to the Chinese Communist Party. And you can see why that would bother a lot of Catholics in China and outside. All right. So Pope Francis is deeply interested in China, even as much of the West is.

is growing hostile toward China. What does that say about Francis and whatever long game he may have in mind, whatever legacy, in fact, he may have in mind? Well, I think, again, there

There is this ongoing concern about making sure that the church in China doesn't split into two churches. A schism for the Catholic Church is very, very focused on unity. It's essential to its identity. So the idea of a schism is it keeps popes awake at night. So that's one thing. But I think particularly with Francis' geopolitics, I mean, he's a multipolar pope. He's not what someone said about...

Pope Pius XII in the 1950s during the Cold War, they called him the chaplain of the West. This pope is not the chaplain of the West. He's criticized. He suggested that, you know, the war in Ukraine was provoked by NATO expansion. The other day, he criticized very much Ukraine's ban on the Russian Orthodox Church. But he's been much more, he hasn't criticized the violations of religious freedom in China, for example. ♪

So he has a desire to engage with China because it's the rising superpower. And he's also skeptical, to put it mildly, of the U.S.-led Western order. And I think he, I don't know if counterweight, if it's fair to say he's looking for a counterweight, but he certainly doesn't want to put all the Vatican's eggs in one basket. Vatican reporter Francis X. Rocca. Coming up, a brief history of Catholicism in China.

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I'm Noelle King with Jonathan Tan. Jonathan's a professor of Catholic studies at Case Western Reserve University. He says the Vatican is interested in China, yes, and Chinese are increasingly interested in Catholicism and other religions. I think the Cultural Revolution left a spiritual vacuum for many Chinese and the emptiness of just striving for material needs left

leads many Chinese to turn to religion. It's not just Christianity. There's a huge growth in Buddhism, in Daoism, in Islam, for example, and also Christianity too.

Catholicism arrived in China hundreds of years ago. The first Franciscan John of Monte Corvino rolled up in 1294. But of course, it was a foreign religion and it never sat easily with China's dynastic leaders. Also, it was a missionary religion. Catholics wanted to convert people. So over the centuries, waves of Catholics entered China and there were corresponding waves of anti-Catholic sentiment, sometimes culminating in the massacres of Chinese worshipers.

And then came the modern era, the mid-20th century, when Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party took control. Now, of grave concern to Mao and the communist leadership was the fact that the Chinese

leadership structure of Christian churches, Protestant and Catholic were still largely foreign in nature. So we're talking about leadership, the bishops as well as at the local level were still very much European. So foreigners controlled the purse strings. Foreigners controlled the appointment of leaders and leadership vested in European and North American hands. So in 1951,

The Communist administration established the Religious Affairs Bureau. The Religious Affairs Bureau was to oversee and to reform China's religions to make it fit in accordance with the official communist ideology of China. We will hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong's thought. We bell against the imperialists, the revisionists and the bourgeoisie.

The Religious Affairs Bureau worked with sympathetic native Chinese Catholic priests and bishops to establish the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the so-called official Catholic church. Now, the point for your listeners to note is that the official church is not a heretical church. This is 100% Catholic. So the...

The dispute, the controversy between the Vatican and Beijing has nothing to do with doctrine. It has nothing to do with theology. It's all about politics, power, control. So the central tenet of the CCPA is Chinese, we choose our own bishops.

So the CCPA appointed the first wave of illicit native Chinese bishops without the Pope's consent. So Pope Pius took a very hard-line stance. He refused to recognize any CCPA-appointed bishops who were selected without prior Vatican approval. So this was the issue.

Now, there were many Chinese Catholic clergy and ordinary Catholics who rejected the oversight of the CCPA and the CCPA bishops. Now, together with the Chinese Protestants who rejected similar oversight of Protestant leadership, they formed the so-called underground house churches.

I think our listeners may hear that and think people are practicing in secret. They're making sure that nobody knows where they are. You're saying it's not like that. No, it's not like that. In fact, the overwhelming majority of bishops in China today are both underground and official. First, we find the state-run church and just a short drive down the same street, the underground church, an unassuming building but clearly marked.

From the car, we watch believers file in. First slowly, then by the hundreds. Clearly, quite a crowd has amassed inside. Over the decades, what the Vatican has tried to do is to try to bring slowly the so-called underground church back into unity with the Holy See without

causing an uproar with Beijing. So what the Vatican is trying to do is to recognize the legacy of all this unholy collaboration between empire and church and to try to reset the relationship. So,

So the 2018 agreement recognized a major coup for Rome. Because if you look at it, what the agreement says is that the CCPA would no longer unilaterally choose bishops. Now that is a major concession on the part of Beijing. The CCPA would recommend a slate of candidates for paper approval.

The Holy See has veto power over these recommendations, and the CCPA would accept the Holy See's decision. We talked earlier in the show about sinicization, about China wanting to make systems, maybe its economic system or a religious system like Catholicism,

that are in line with or that have Chinese characteristics. Now, some people think religion is religion. It's not supposed to change based on where it is. Is there pushback that says the Catholic Church should be the Catholic Church, whether it's in China or Spain or Nigeria? So here is a tension. The Catholic Church enculturates or adopts

the cultural forms of the communities that it is ministering to. So there has been pushback by ultra-conservatives and traditionalists within the church who say, no, no, no, we have to maintain the Eurocentric norms. And many of these conservatives

supposedly universal stuff like pipe organ or Gothic architecture, Latin, is essentially Eurocentric. So you see this tension, broadly speaking, throughout the Catholic Church. Now, in China, it has been politicized by many conservative American politicians because

Xi Jinping has introduced what he termed as a program of sinicization. Sinicization of social values, of business, of economics. So we want capitalism, but capitalism with Chinese characteristics. We want to do business, we want education, but it's sinicized, not Western. Does this program of sinicization exist?

at all levels of Chinese society, also apply to religious practices. So what Xi Jinping wants is religious practices that are Chinese in orientation and supportive and friendly towards China's socialist ideals. People who are hostile towards Xi Jinping and his politics, you know, see this as an attempt

to control the church. So many conservative Catholics around the world, in the US, in Europe, even in China and Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zan, for example, see this as a sellout. They're giving the frog into the mouth of the wolves. It's an incredible betrayal.

All right, so I understand what Xi wants. What would Pope Francis want out of a visit, if he could get one? He wants rapprochement. He wants to strengthen the dialogue. Ultimately, he wants to bring the entire Chinese Catholic flock back to unity and communion with the Holy See.

To achieve that, it's a kind of give and take between China at the Holy See and Beijing. So that both sides negotiate and compromise so that it's a win-win situation for both parties.

Jonathan Tan of Case Western Reserve University. Halima Shah produced today's show. Matthew Collette edited. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered. And Laura Bullard fact-checked. The rest of our team includes Amanda Llewellyn, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mouagdi, Miles Bryan, Peter Balanon, Rosen, Victoria Chamberlain.

Amina El-Sadi is a supervising editor. Miranda Kennedy is an executive producer. Sean Ramos' firm is working on work-life balance. Stay tuned for that. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is part of Vox. If you want to support our journalism, you can do so by joining our membership program. Just go to vox.com slash members to sign up. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.