Asian Angle | The Pope has kissed and made up with China. Can the Dalai Lama?
Pope Francis has pulled off a landmark deal by getting Beijing to recognise the Vatican’s influence – and his approach may impart valuable lessons to the Dalai Lama, should there be any hope for reconciliation with Tibet on the cards
In August 2014, on entering Chinese airspace during a flight to Seoul, he broke six decades of silence between the Vatican and the head of China’s government by posting a message of goodwill to President Xi Jinping. Fittingly, on his birthday later that December, talks brokered by Francis were announced that would in time lead to the normalisation of ties between the Castro regime in Cuba and the Obama administration. The US-Cuba agreement was signed at the Vatican Secretariat of State. In February 2016, almost a thousand years after the rupture of the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity, Pope Francis held a first meeting with his Russian Orthodox counterpart, Patriarch Kirill, in Havana. Francis’ millennia-spanning achievements are not one for the faint-hearted.
The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), the “self-run Church” hitherto established and controlled by the state, is to be downgraded and reoriented. In exchange, Pope Francis is expected to lift the excommunications of seven CCPA-installed bishops and formally recognise them as the leaders of their dioceses. More broadly, a mechanism that enables Beijing to provide its acceptable slate of candidates and the Vatican to have a final say in selection will now be formalised.
The fate of the three dozen or so Vatican-approved prelates, some of whom are in prison, who are not recognised by the CCPA is unclear at this time. The larger hope, though, is that as the splintering of the Catholic Church in China is reversed, the churches above and underground will in time be reconciled. Perhaps, a papal visit could be on the cards, too.
Both sides stand to gain handsomely from the compromise. For the Vatican, its pre-eminence on all matters ecclesiastical in the sovereign territorial space of China has been formally confirmed for the first time by the communist government in Beijing. For the Chinese Communist Party, its overarching and “guiding” role in harnessing religious belief to “help social harmony, modernisation [and a] healthy civilisation” – a key principle of its post-1980s religious policy – is vindicated without having to cede (though having to share) control on key decision-making to an entity that is housed beyond its sovereign territorial space.
