My Take | Uneasy pact appears to suit Vatican and China right now

Beijing has been playing hard ball with the Vatican. Having tentatively reached an agreement in 2018 on the method of selecting mutually acceptable bishops on the mainland, China hasn’t been exactly following it.

This month, Beijing named Joseph Shen Bin as the new bishop of Shanghai, the country’s biggest Catholic diocese, apparently without seeking prior approval from Rome under the 2018 agreement, which was extended for two years in 2022. It was likewise with the appointment in November of the auxiliary bishop of Jiangxi, a diocese which the Vatican does not even recognise. Of course, the pact has never been published, so we don’t know what the exact terms are.

But besides issuing a statement of protest, the Vatican has not gone for the nuclear option and accused Beijing of not honouring their deal. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and second-in-command in charge of the equivalent of the city state of Rome’s foreign policy, has been consistently conciliatory with Beijing to the extent that he has been accused of “shameless” and “dishonest” appeasement by the former head of the Hong Kong diocese, Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun.

Perhaps as a small reward, the city’s current diocese head, Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-yan, will travel to the mainland this week at the invitation of his Beijing counterpart Joseph Li Shan, who is also head of the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

The first such visit from Hong Kong in 29 years, such a highly symbolic invitation would not be possible without Beijing’s authorisation. Clearly Chinese leaders don’t want to make the Vatican completely lose face. Meanwhile, Parolin must hope that at some future point, the agreement will stick. But to put it bluntly, the Vatican has no leverage while China clearly thinks it has all the time in the world.