You can’t bargain with the devil! This should be clearly understood by Vatican officials who persist in establishing, at all costs, improved relations with communist China. The Chinese government will never openly accept the Catholic Church. It will never recognize anything other than state-back churches with bishops sympathetic to the communist regime. Essentially, the true Catholic Church must remain an underground institution in China.
Chinese Catholics have been recently encouraged by some Vatican officials to seek government recognition as members of the “official” or “open” church, a step that would require them to join the government-run Catholic Patriotic Association. This has emboldened authorities in Beijing to appoint bishops without papal approval, and has managed to sway many Chinese Catholics to the government’s side. This strategy of compromise is of a piece with the old “Ostpolitik”- Pope Paul VI’s controversial policy of accommodating Communist governments in an attempt to obtain better conditions for Catholics behind the Iron Curtain during the 1960s and 70s. This policy of compromise failed in Russia just as it is failing today in China.
The church is called to evangelize and so it must try to work with the world’s governments and with various peoples and those of different faiths. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul II reminds us that “In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth” (Ut Unum Sint 18). In the Gospel of Life (82) he further states: In the proclamation of this Gospel, we must not fear hostility or unpopularity, and we must refuse any compromise or ambiguity which might conform us to the world’s way of thinking (cf. Rom 12:2).
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Good article.
“The church is called to evangelize.” – Well, that’s the problem right there, isn’t it. You know what Muslim terrorists want to do, too? Convert the world into Muslims. Sounds pretty similar, doesn’t it? And what’s that? There are Christian terrorist groups who kill abortion-giving doctors and brutalize gays and beat the hell out of their wives? OMG! Wow, they sound almost the same!
Sarcasm aside, the other problem here? You’ve begun with the premise that the Chinese are “evil.” You go so far as calling them “the devil” in the first sentence of your essay. If you took the time to study China and get to know more about Chinese people and their way of life, you might have begun this essay in a more civilized, intelligent way. Instead, you’ve decided to announce your ignorance with a loudspeaker far larger than anything Pappy has ever installed atop his vehicle, and the rest of your article does nothing to assuage this.
The colonists really taught you well! Learn to be an educated person who makes his or her own decisions. Don’t just assume what your slave-masters’ missionaries taught you is the truth. The Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe: these are much bigger places than the book they originally used to justify enslaving us.
Is Mr. Paul Kokoski serious? “True Catholic Church?”
Are you suggesting that there is a “false Catholic Church?”
I think Mr. Kokoski is living in the medieval ages. He doesn’t understand that we are a global village whether we like it or not. Catholic Church is finished once you start molesting little boys and girls.
A world revolution is on the rise…the world is experiencing serious oppression ever witnessed in history. The beautiful thing is the muslims always start it
In 1979 – it started in Iran
In 2011 – it started in Tunisia
More people are converting to Islam but the western media will not show you this.
The Muslims start “serious oppression?” Certainly. That’s not what you meant, but perhaps Freudian slips appear even in typos.
The Muslims started it? You mean 9/11, alongside those “revolutions?” Sure thing.
I do have to agree about the Catholic church being finished.
If there are revolutions worth happening, it’s for freethought and for science going further than it’s ever gone before.
Another western stooge
If I do not accept your belief, COMPROMISE through TOLERANCE is the only alternative.
So what is wrong with the Chinese compromising or tolerating? Does the Vatican want China to become a Catholic state? Which country is? Most if not all states profess ‘christianity’.
All these popes, pastors, etc. etc. and etc. must stop with the hypocrisy.
They need to rid the Church of the child molesters and money mongers that’s what!
and adulterous pastors too
So Chinese government is the devil now? The pop looks like the damn devil.
chinese government is always devil, the doh believe in the god me and you believe in, read, read, read
Does “judge not lest ye be judged” mean anything different to you?