The archbishop processed up the aisle behind a group of priests, deacons and altar servers, one of them swinging a thurifer as it pumped out thick gusts of incense. Behind them, a great organ thundered from the loft, as one of the cathedral’s 10 choirs led the congregation in an introductory hymn.
This was high Mass at Beijing’s North Cathedral, a late 19th-century church near the city’s financial district built in the French Gothic style in the shape of a cross with an elaborate grey marble facade. There are holy water stoups inside each entrance, stations of the cross on the pillars lining the nave, votive statues in alcoves and side altars, and confessionals and a baptismal font at the back of the church.
The church sits in a large compound and the courtyard outside features two gold-roofed pavilions and other Chinese architectural features including 60 carved lions. The stained glass windows show scenes from the history of the Catholic Church in China and one of the most popular shrines inside features a Chinese Madonna and child.
“It’s a combination of the West and the East, the Catholic Church and the Chinese culture,” said Fr Simon Zhu, who has been a priest at the cathedral since 2014.
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“We feel very blessed to have such a design. Even 100 years ago, the missionaries already started inculturation or Sinicization, the combination of Catholic culture and Chinese culture, Catholic thinking, plus Chinese thinking, and combining the two together.”
The principle of inculturation, adapting Christian teachings to local cultures, has a long tradition in the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Matteo Ricci blended Catholic faith with Chinese thinking in the 17th century. But the word Sinicization also refers to Xi Jinping’s policy that “religions in China must be Chinese in orientation”, incorporated into socialist society and independent of foreign influence.
The archbishop of Beijing, Joseph Li Shan, is also the president of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), the representative body for Catholics officially recognised by the Chinese Communist Party. Most of China’s roughly 10 million Catholics attend officially sanctioned churches such as the North Cathedral but a substantial minority belong to the so-called “underground church”, attending masses in unapproved venues and private homes.
Under Pope Francis, the Vatican entered into an agreement with China in 2018 aimed at ending the division between the two Catholic communities by regularising the appointment of bishops. But the agreement, which was renewed last October for four years, has drawn criticism from some Catholics who fear it cedes too much influence to the Communist Party.
The liturgy at high Mass at the cathedral was indistinguishable from that in any Catholic church in Europe and the archbishop’s sermon focused on the importance of faith and repentance. His only reference to any political issue was at the start of Mass when he said he hoped that China and the Vatican would soon establish diplomatic relations.
The cathedral parish has five priests and one deacon, and in a convent behind the church live 50 nuns from the Congregation of St Joseph, a French order that has been in Beijing for more than 150 years. Although the Beijing diocese is more than 700 years old, created by an Italian Franciscan missionary in 1307, Fr Zhu describes the Catholic Church in China as a developing church.
“We would challenge our ministers, our church servers to watch how the developed church does things. Of course, number one, the standard for the Catholic Church, that’s Rome. So do whatever Rome does,” he said.
A small Chinese flag on Fr Zhu’s desk was the only symbol of the state I saw at the North Cathedral and his conversation was peppered with references to the pope and his guidance to parishes. The cathedral has three groups undergoing the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults the official Catholic process for joining the Church.
“Anybody can come here and say, I would like to learn more about becoming a Catholic and we just assist. To be a Catholic or to be a Christian in this country is also God’s calling. We just try to assist to make the seed of faith, the seed of belief, grow toward maturity,” Fr Zhu said.
The Chinese Communist Party is officially atheist, forbidding its 99 million members from practising religion and the early years of the People’s Republic of China saw the exile of foreign missionaries and the arrest of priests and bishops. After the foundation of the CCPA in 1957, Pope Pius XXII said anyone who took part in the consecration of bishops without the Vatican’s approval would be excommunicated.
Chinese Catholics who remained loyal to Rome formed the underground church but after 1966 the Cultural Revolution saw the systematic suppression and destruction of all religion.
Deng Xiaoping’s liberalisation brought a lighter touch to the regulation of religion and from 1981 Catholics were no longer obliged to pledge independence from the Pope and the Holy See. Restrictions tightened again in 1994 when all places of worship had to be registered with the government, opening the way for the arrest and prosecution of priests and bishops in the underground church for violating the regulation.
Meanwhile, bishops consecrated in the patriotic church without papal approval were not recognised by the Holy See while bishops in the underground church were seen by the Chinese authorities as illegitimate. The 2018 Provisional Agreement on the Appointment of Bishops, the text of which has never been published, was designed to regularise the status of bishops with an agreed system for approving them.
This meant that bishops would be nominated by the Chinese authorities but the Vatican would have a veto over their appointment. Pope Francis immediately readmitted to “full, ecclesial communion” eight bishops from the patriotic church who had been appointed without Vatican approval and some bishops from the underground church were recognised by the Chinese authorities.
Ten bishops have been appointed under the new system since 2018 and the Vatican has yet to object formally to anyone nominated by the Chinese authorities. After the agreement’s renewal last year, the Pope said “the results are positive, and we are working with goodwill”, adding that he was pleased with the Vatican’s dialogue with China.
Sergio Ticozzi is a Hong Kong-based Italian priest and an expert on the church in China whose books include China and the Catholic Church: Through Mutual Eyes. He believes the agreement is a very positive and effective channel for communication and dialogue, if both parties have a clear mutual understanding of what they are talking about but that China and the Vatican have different understandings of the terms at the heart of the agreement: bishops and appointment.
“For the Chinese authorities bishops are considered just public state officials, to be ‘democratically’ elected, while for the Vatican, they should be religious heads of a diocese or local church with a ‘sacred’ or divine authority. Consequently, the choice of the episcopal candidates by Chinese authorities is based mainly upon being a politically reliable person and obedient to the government/party, while for the Vatican they should have moral, doctrinal and pastoral qualifications,” he said.
“As far as the ‘appointment’ is concerned, the Vatican understands it as the handing down to the candidate of God’s authority upon a diocese, but for the Chinese side it simply means Vatican’s ‘agreement or approval’ of the elected candidate.”
Both the official church of the majority of Chinese Catholics and the underground church are in full communion with Rome and the agreement’s supporters hope that it will help to bring the two communities together. The Holy See has told priests in the underground church that they should not be forced to register with the Chinese authorities but Fr Ticozzi says that they are under great pressure to do so.
“The Chinese authorities want clearly to eliminate this section of the church, and exploit the ambiguous and silent attitude of the Vatican to achieve their objective. They openly make use of the Sino-Vatican agreement for this purpose: they do not show great concern about providing bishops for the more than 30 vacant dioceses, but prefer to propose their own episcopal candidate for dioceses which already have unofficial bishops, in order to force the Vatican to order the latter to accept the government solution, which can be rather unjust,” he said.
The Vatican is one of only a handful of states in the world that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than with the People’s Republic of China and Beijing would like to change that. Some in the Vatican see the establishment of diplomatic relations with Beijing as a desirable next step in the process of normalisation of which the 2018 agreement was a part.
Fr Ticozzi is pessimistic about the future of the church in China, noting a dimming of religious fervour among younger generations and a lack of spiritual guidance from above.
“The official emphasis will be on formal appearances, on external show of ceremonies, on the political interpretation and role of the clergy, since bishops and communities are required first to obey the government’s orders,” he said.
“The official reports speak about various religious celebrations, construction of new churches, ordination of new priests and religious profession of new nuns, spiritual retreats and pilgrimages, religious symposia and study meetings. Several priests and sisters are truly very committed. But, the number of baptisms of adults is not high, bishops are kept busy by the authorities in political meetings, tours and banquets, lay people often are left by themselves without a solid catechesis and spiritual formation.”
Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, a historian at Hong Kong Baptist University and the author of a number of books on the Catholic Church in modern China, is more upbeat. She believes the fact that there are no longer any illicit bishops in the Chinese church is a big step forward that will enable more dialogue.
“It’s very slow. But I think the Pope wants it very much and wants to have dialogue. Even before he became pope he wanted to have dialogue with the Chinese church,” she said.
“I think that he was interested in working with the Chinese people because it’s a large population and there had be so many conflicts along the way. I think that’s the reason. It’s not something diplomatic or something like that. I think it’s just out of sincerity.”
Prof Chu acknowledges the sense of being abandoned felt by some in the underground church but argues that, since the pope still accepts them as Catholics, they have not been forgotten. And she rejects the argument that the church should not engage with the Communist Party.
“Should we just continue to hate them? That doesn’t do any good for the people,” she said.
Back in the North Cathedral, Fr Zhu was feeling optimistic too, noting that the convent has six new novices this year and that vocations for the priesthood are increasing steadily. When he returned from the Philippines in 2014, he was one of only a handful of priests in the diocese but now there are 91 and he says the change is visible.
“Every year, we get around two priests in the diocese of Beijing. An increase of two priests per year, that’s pretty good,” he said.
“I think there are some good signs. Maybe God really works in a very mysterious way.”
