Rome’s Red Line Runs Through Écône, Not Beijing
Pope Leo XIV has approved two episcopal appointments in Inner Mongolia within eight days under the Vatican–Beijing agreement. The deeper problem is not merely that Communist China has a voice in the process. The men concerned have emerged from an official ecclesiastical structure whose current statutes require support for Communist Party leadership, Xi Jinping Thought and the “independent” administration of the Church—principles whose ecclesiology Benedict XVI explicitly judged incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Against that background, Rome’s severity towards Écône becomes increasingly difficult to explain.
There are moments when an institution reveals its priorities less by what it formally teaches than by the things over which it is prepared to negotiate. Rome has just provided such a moment. On 22 July 2026, Joseph Chang Yanfeng was ordained Bishop of Chifeng in Inner Mongolia. One week later, on 29 July, Francis Xavier Duan Yongkun was ordained Coadjutor Bishop of Bameng. In both cases the Holy See stated that Pope Leo XIV had appointed the men on 15 June after approving their candidatures “within the framework of the Provisional Agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China”.¹ ² The appointments therefore cannot be dismissed as faits accomplis imposed upon an unwilling Pope. They were approved by Leo XIV and constitute a further implementation, under his pontificate, of the China policy inherited from Pope Francis.
A necessary distinction should be made immediately, but it must not be permitted to obscure the more important reality. There is no evidence before us that either bishop is formally a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, formal Party doctrine remains Marxist and atheistic. But it would be equally misleading to leap from that observation to the presumption that these men somehow stand outside the Communist state’s ecclesiastical machinery. They plainly do not. Neither reaches the episcopate simply as a priest reluctantly enduring an objectionable government from a distance. Both have occupied significant positions within the officially recognised Catholic establishment, and that establishment’s own governing documents reveal an ecclesiastical structure in which Catholic administration, Communist political leadership and the ideological programme of the state are deliberately intertwined.
The present statutes of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association are astonishingly explicit. The Association declares as part of its purpose that it will support “the leadership of the Communist Party of China” and the socialist system, study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, pursue the Sinicisation of Catholicism, adapt Catholicism actively to socialist society and maintain the principle of an independently and autonomously administered Church. It is formally subject to the guidance and supervision of the State Administration for Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Its stated functions include ideological education in patriotism, Xi Jinping Thought and the principle of an independently administered Church, while its theological programme seeks interpretations of Catholic doctrine judged consonant with the developmental requirements of contemporary China.³
This is not an interpretation imposed upon the Patriotic Association by its critics. It is the Patriotic Association describing itself.
More disturbing still are the current statutes of the body calling itself the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China. Its own foundational article declares support for the leadership of the Communist Party, support for the socialist system, study and implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, adherence in political, economic and ecclesiastical affairs to the principle of “independence and autonomy” and commitment to the Sinicisation of Catholicism. It too is placed under the guidance and supervision of state authorities. Yet this same body claims competence to study and expound Catholic doctrine and discipline, issue teaching documents, establish pastoral offices and regulations and, together with the Patriotic Association, direct diocesan episcopal elections, “examine and approve” candidates emerging from those elections and organise episcopal consecrations.⁴
The implications hardly require embellishment. An organisation styling itself an episcopal conference professes statutory communion with the successor of Peter while simultaneously pledging itself to Communist Party leadership, Xi Jinping Thought and independent ecclesiastical administration; it is supervised by organs of the secular state while claiming competence over doctrine, pastoral government and the selection of bishops. Its senior officers are themselves required by statute to support Communist Party leadership and maintain the principle of an independently administered Church.⁵ Whatever diplomatic terminology is preferred, this is not the normal juridical autonomy of a Catholic episcopal conference.
Joseph Chang Yanfeng did not reach the episcopate from outside this system. The official Chinese Catholic report of his consecration identifies him as director of the Chifeng Catholic Patriotic Association and records that he had been “elected” bishop-designate on 20 March 2026. At his consecration the secretary-general of the Chinese state-recognised episcopal body read that body’s document of approval.⁶ Thus the ceremony itself exhibited the two parallel realities now characteristic of the Vatican–China settlement: Rome stated that Pope Leo had appointed Chang after approving his candidature under the secret agreement, while the Chinese official structure publicly presented its own election and approval process.
Chang’s institutional role was not merely nominal. In October 2025, while administering Chifeng, he personally led the priests and some religious of the diocese in studying a speech of Xi Jinping on religious affairs and the state’s rules governing the online conduct of religious personnel. According to the official Chinese Catholic account, Chang instructed priests and religious to observe the regulations strictly, uphold a “patriotic and pro-Party position”, practise socialist core values, guide religion towards adaptation to socialist society and advance the Sinicisation of Catholicism.⁷ These are not hostile allegations. They are statements published by the recognised Chinese Catholic apparatus itself.
Francis Xavier Duan Yongkun likewise emerged through the officially recognised system. An official account from November 2022 identifies him as deputy diocesan administrator and deputy director and secretary-general of the local Catholic “two associations”. Duan personally led the study of the report of the Twentieth Communist Party Congress and urged clergy and religious to implement its spirit comprehensively, understand the programme of Chinese-style modernisation and connect their work with national unity, national security and the wider objectives of the state.⁸ In January 2026 he was again elected deputy director and secretary-general of Bayannur’s Catholic “two associations” at a congress attended by United Front officials and explicitly committed to the role of religious organisations as a bridge between the Party and government on the one hand and religious believers on the other.⁹
None of this entitles us to pass judgment upon either bishop’s interior conscience. That point matters. Chinese clergy live under pressures most Western ecclesiastics will never experience. External conformity may arise from conviction, coercion, prudential compromise, fear for one’s flock or an inextricable combination of these things. A priest might repeat political formulae to keep a church open; a bishop might participate in an official association because he believes that refusal would destroy sacramental life for thousands. Catholic moral theology has always distinguished the objective character of an act from the subjective culpability of the person performing it.
But charity towards individual consciences does not require intellectual blindness concerning the objective ecclesiology of the institutions involved. Nor does it require us to pretend that episcopal candidates who rise to senior positions inside such an apparatus carry no antecedent doctrinal questions with them. A man need not possess a Communist Party membership card for Catholics reasonably to ask how his repeated public profession of “pro-Party” principles, Sinicisation and socialist adaptation coheres with the doctrine of the Church.
More importantly, Rome has already supplied the standard by which the system itself should be judged. Pope Benedict XVI did so with remarkable precision.
In his 2007 Letter to the Church in China, Benedict warned that organisations “desired by the State and extraneous to the structure of the Church” had been imposed as principal determinants of Catholic life. His objection was not merely to administrative inconvenience. He insisted that the preaching of the Gospel, catechesis, charitable activity, liturgical worship and pastoral choices belonged uniquely to the bishops with their priests in continuity with the faith received from the Apostles and therefore could not be subjected to external interference.¹⁰
He then addressed the principle at the heart of the Patriotic system in language which could scarcely be stronger. The purpose of implementing “the principles of independence and autonomy, self-management and democratic administration of the Church”, Benedict wrote, was “incompatible with Catholic doctrine”.¹¹ That is not the language of a Pope identifying a minor canonical irregularity. He was identifying a proposition about the nature and government of the Church which contradicted Catholic ecclesiology.
Nor can this now be dismissed as Benedict addressing an obsolete version of the Patriotic apparatus. The current statutes still proclaim “independence and autonomy” in ecclesiastical affairs. They still make “democratic” administration part of the institutional structure. But they now do so while expressly requiring support for Communist Party leadership, implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, the socialist system and Sinicisation. The propositions Benedict condemned have therefore not simply disappeared from the official Chinese structure. On the face of its own current documents, they remain embedded within it and have been integrated still more explicitly into the ideological vocabulary of the Communist state.³ ⁴
Benedict made the same point concerning the official Chinese episcopal body. He stated that it could not be recognised by the Apostolic See as an episcopal conference because, among other problems, underground bishops in communion with Rome were excluded, illegitimate bishops participated and its statutes contained elements incompatible with Catholic doctrine.¹² In 2010 the Holy See reiterated its objection when the Eighth Assembly of Chinese Catholic Representatives was imposed upon bishops, priests, religious and laity, condemning the continuing effort to interfere in the internal life of the Catholic Church.¹³
This history radically alters the terms of the present debate. The question is not simply whether Beijing suggests candidates and the Pope gives the final answer. The deeper question is what kind of ecclesiastical organism generates, filters, elects and promotes those candidates before the papal decision is made. Benedict’s objection concerned the ecclesiology of the system itself: whether bodies created or controlled outside the divine constitution of the Church could exercise authority over bishops and over matters belonging intrinsically to the Church’s supernatural government.
That principle has another ancient name: libertas Ecclesiae. The freedom of the Church is not a concession bestowed by tolerant governments, still less a modern liberal invention. It follows from what the Church is. Leo XIII taught in Immortale Dei that the Church is a society “chartered as of right divine”, perfect in her nature and title and possessing within herself the provisions necessary for her proper maintenance and action. Her authority, he insisted, cannot be regarded as inferior to the civil power or in any manner dependent upon it. To subject the Church to civil authority in the discharge of her proper mission is to invert the correct order by subordinating supernatural things to natural things.¹⁴
Saint Pius X made the same principle concrete in Vehementer Nos. Confronted with a French political settlement which effectively transferred important ecclesiastical functions away from the divinely constituted hierarchy and towards associations governed under civil law, he judged that such arrangements seriously violated the rights of the Church and stood in opposition to her divine constitution.¹⁵ The French Third Republic was not Communist China, and historical analogies should not be abused. But the ecclesiological principle remains the same: Caesar cannot reorganise the supernatural constitution of the Church simply because Caesar possesses the police, the courts and the machinery of civil recognition.
History itself requires nuance here. The Church has not always demanded that civil rulers possess no influence whatever upon episcopal appointments. Catholic monarchs sometimes enjoyed rights of presentation or nomination under concordats; cathedral chapters historically elected bishops; the Concordat of 1801 permitted Napoleon to nominate bishops whom the Pope then canonically instituted. The Church’s quarrel with temporal government was therefore never reducible to the proposition that a ruler must never express an opinion concerning an episcopal candidate.
The deeper line was different. Civil power could not become the source of sacred jurisdiction, absorb the supernatural government of the Church, construct a national episcopate independent of Peter or subordinate the episcopal office to a political ideology. Concordats might regulate the circumstances in which candidates were proposed. They could not make the state master of the Church’s constitution.
The Investiture Controversy mattered for precisely this reason. Saint Gregory VII was not fighting over medieval pageantry. Behind the disputes over rings, croziers, homage and appointment lay the question whether episcopal office belonged fundamentally to the Church or could be bestowed and controlled by temporal rulers. Saint Thomas Becket’s struggle with Henry II arose in different circumstances but concerned the same frontier: where does Caesar’s legitimate authority end when it encounters a society possessing jurisdiction which Caesar did not create?
Kings wanted manageable bishops. Enlightened absolutists wanted manageable national churches. Revolutionaries wanted constitutional clergy. Communist regimes wanted patriotic churches. The vocabulary changes. The temptation remains.
This is also why the rhetoric of “Sinicisation” must be treated with precision. There is nothing remotely objectionable about Catholicism becoming profoundly Chinese. The Church has never required conversion to Christ to entail cultural conversion to Italy, France, Spain or Ireland. A genuinely Chinese Catholicism, rooted deeply in everything true, noble and beautiful in Chinese civilisation and producing Chinese saints, theological schools, sacred art and Christian institutions, would be an expression of Catholic universality.
But that is not all that the official documents mean by Sinicisation. They place it alongside Communist Party leadership, Xi Jinping Thought, socialist core values and adaptation to socialist society. The Patriotic Association expressly commits itself to ideological education under the leadership of the Party and government, while both it and the official episcopal body undertake to develop theological interpretations of Catholic doctrine corresponding to contemporary Chinese development and the requirements of Chinese culture.³ ⁴
The distinction is fundamental. The Catholic Church may be completely Chinese. She cannot be Communist.
A Chinese bishop should love China. He should pray for its rulers, obey its just laws, value its civilisation and encourage his faithful to contribute generously to the common good. Patriotism is no offence against Catholicism. But the episcopal office cannot acquire its theological meaning from Xi Jinping Thought, and the hierarchy cannot become a transmission mechanism between Communist Party policy and Catholic doctrine. The Apostles did not receive their commission from Caesar. Their successors cannot receive theirs from the ideological apparatus of a modern one-party state.
Defenders of the Vatican agreement correctly respond that the Pope retains the final decision. That is an important distinction. It would be inaccurate to describe the present arrangement simply as Beijing appointing bishops while Rome submits. Both July announcements deliberately state that Pope Leo XIV appointed the men after approving their candidatures under the Provisional Agreement.¹ ² The papal act is real.
But a papal veto is not necessarily the same thing as genuine freedom of selection. If the domestic ecclesiastical structure determines which priests may operate publicly, which clerics rise through recognised institutions, which men acquire the political credibility to become candidates, which diocesan elections are permitted, and which names receive the approval of a body whose statutes require Communist Party loyalty, then the Pope’s final decision may remain juridically real while the field upon which he exercises it has already been profoundly conditioned. The official episcopal statutes are unambiguous that the Chinese body, together with the Patriotic Association, directs episcopal elections, examines and approves the candidates produced by them and organises consecrations.⁴
This is where the continued secrecy of the Vatican–Beijing agreement becomes particularly difficult to defend. The agreement was first signed in 2018, extended in 2020 and 2022, and renewed in October 2024 for a further four years. The Holy See described the latest extension as an instrument of “respectful and constructive dialogue” intended for the benefit of the Catholic Church in China and the Chinese people.¹⁶ Yet its substantive terms remain unpublished.
We therefore still cannot answer some of the most elementary questions concerning episcopal appointments in China. Who first identifies the possible candidates? Can Rome introduce a candidate whom the Chinese authorities regard as politically unacceptable? Can Beijing effectively prevent such a candidate from progressing? What relationship exists between the secret Vatican procedure and the public statutes according to which the official Chinese bishops’ organisation examines and approves episcopal candidates? What degree of participation in Sinicisation is expected of a bishop after his appointment? What happens when a bishop rejects an ideological requirement? What occurs when Beijing and Rome disagree?
Diplomatic secrecy may sometimes be necessary. The Holy See has negotiated discreetly with hostile regimes throughout modern history, particularly when publicity might endanger the very Catholics diplomacy seeks to protect. No responsible critic should demand that every private exchange between Vatican negotiators and Chinese officials be published. But secrecy cannot indefinitely substitute for ecclesiological explanation. After eight years, repeated renewals and implementation under two pontificates, Catholics are entitled to know how the mechanism governing apostolic succession is reconciled with the principles Benedict XVI laid down.
Cardinal Joseph Zen’s persistent opposition to the agreement consequently deserves rather more consideration than is sometimes afforded it. His objection is not the childish proposition that the Vatican should never speak to Communists. Rome has negotiated with hostile governments for centuries. His concern is that Catholics who maintained communion with the Holy See at considerable personal cost may ultimately discover that the price of ecclesiastical normalisation is incorporation into precisely the state-supervised structures they resisted. Critics including Zen continued to warn of excessive Chinese control when the agreement was extended for another four years in 2024.¹⁷
Those underground Catholics did not suffer because they objected to diplomacy. They suffered because they believed that Catholic communion entailed something objective: that the Church in China was not a department of the Communist state and that apostolic authority could not be converted into a function of patriotic religious administration.
And then comes Écône.
The comparison must be made carefully precisely because it is so powerful. The situations are not canonically identical. On 1 July 2026 the Society of Saint Pius X proceeded with four episcopal consecrations without pontifical mandate and contrary to the expressed will of Pope Leo XIV. The following day the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its decree concerning the consecrating bishops and the four newly consecrated bishops, while the accompanying explanatory note extended the Roman judgment to the clergy and, under stated conditions, the faithful attached to the Society.¹⁸ Rome’s fundamental principle is understandable: episcopal succession is not the private property of individual bishops, and a bishop cannot simply manufacture a permanent hierarchy independent of Peter whenever he personally decides that circumstances justify doing so.
Traditional Catholics do themselves no service by pretending that this principle is unimportant. It is profoundly Catholic. Leo XIII’s Satis Cognitum teaches that Christ willed not merely unity of faith but a visible unity of government and communion, with Peter and his successors constituting the principle and centre of that unity.¹⁹ Papal primacy cannot be treated as a dispensable administrative inconvenience whenever resistance becomes difficult.
That is why the strongest defence of Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988, and of the Society’s conduct in 2026, does not claim that the papal mandate is inherently irrelevant. It rests upon the exceptional plea of necessity: that the crisis in doctrine, liturgy, priestly formation and ecclesiastical government became so grave that preserving the means of transmitting Catholic Tradition required an act which would be unlawful under ordinary circumstances. Rome rejects that plea. One may agree with Rome. But the actual argument concerns necessity within Catholic order, not the replacement of Catholic order by some competing political principle.
The Society does not teach that an independent national Church should exist apart from Rome. It does not require episcopal candidates to support an atheistic political party or assimilate Catholic teaching to Marxist ideology. It does not claim that the civil state possesses authority to examine episcopal candidates. It professes the Roman primacy while resisting particular exercises of Roman authority, claiming that an emergency affecting the Church’s Tradition justifies exceptional action.
The official Chinese ecclesiastical apparatus presents almost the inverse problem. Its published statutes require support for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist system and Xi Jinping Thought. They affirm independent ecclesiastical administration. They subject national Catholic structures to state supervision. They give the state-recognised episcopal organisation, acting with the Patriotic Association, a role in directing episcopal elections and examining and approving candidates. And the ecclesiological principles historically underlying those structures were expressly judged by Benedict XVI to be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.
That is why the comparison cannot be dismissed merely by saying that the Chinese bishops possess papal approval while the SSPX bishops did not. That identifies the canonical distinction; it does not answer the ecclesiological contradiction. Indeed, it makes the contradiction sharper. Rome has supplied canonical legitimacy to candidates who emerge through organisations containing principles a previous Pope condemned while declaring the gravest ecclesiastical penalties against bishops who profess Roman primacy but appeal to necessity in order to preserve Catholic Tradition.
Again, the two cases are not identical. That is precisely why the different instincts with which Rome approaches them become so revealing.
With Beijing, the vocabulary is patience, dialogue, gradualism, realism and accommodation. China is not told that discussion will resume only when the Communist Party repudiates Marxist atheism, abandons Sinicisation, removes Xi Jinping Thought from Catholic institutional statutes and accepts Leo XIII’s doctrine of libertas Ecclesiae. Such a demand would render diplomacy impossible. Rome therefore begins with China as China actually is, identifies whatever limited goods might be secured and proceeds incrementally.
With Écône, however, unresolved doctrinal disagreement over the Second Vatican Council, religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality and the liturgical reform repeatedly becomes an obstacle to canonical normalisation. Rome does not simply find the largest practical area of agreement, establish a provisional canonical settlement and continue the doctrinal conversation afterwards. Traditional Catholics are expected first to resolve questions which they believe concern the very crisis that produced their irregular position.
Beijing may remain Beijing while Rome negotiates.
Écône must first cease being Écône.
One can object that China is a sovereign state whereas the Society is an internal Catholic body, and therefore that different diplomatic methods are inevitable. Certainly. But that difference does not erase the question; it intensifies it. Rome plainly understands that practical agreement can sometimes precede philosophical agreement when dealing with an atheistic state. Why does the same ecclesiastical imagination so often fail when dealing with Catholics who profess the same Creed, recognise the same sacraments, honour the same saints, acknowledge the same Roman See and preserve a liturgy which formed the Latin Church for centuries?
The present Chinese statutes make the discrepancy still harder to ignore. Benedict did not say that the principles of ecclesiastical “independence and autonomy, self-management and democratic administration” required minor terminological adjustment. He said they were incompatible with Catholic doctrine.¹¹ Yet those principles remain substantially present in the current statutes, now accompanied by mandatory support for Communist Party leadership and Xi Jinping Thought.³ ⁴
What, then, has changed?
Has the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association repudiated the ecclesiology Benedict condemned? Its statutes suggest that it has not. Has the state episcopal body become an ordinary Catholic episcopal conference recognised under the normal discipline of the universal Church? Its published constitution remains strikingly unlike one. Has the principle of independent administration been given a new meaning compatible with papal primacy? If so, Rome has not publicly explained it. Has Sinicisation ceased to involve ideological conformity and become merely legitimate cultural inculturation? The organisations’ own language linking it to socialist society and Party leadership makes such a claim difficult to sustain.
These are doctrinal questions, not merely political ones.
The same applies to the episcopal candidates themselves. It would be unjust to pronounce Chang or Duan heretics merely from their institutional offices. But neither is it satisfactory to regard papal appointment as though it retrospectively renders every question irrelevant. Canonical mission and doctrinal orthodoxy are related but distinct matters. Catholics are perfectly entitled to ask a prospective successor of the Apostles what he means when he publicly urges clergy to maintain a “pro-Party” position, what he understands by independent ecclesiastical administration, and how the requirement to implement Xi Jinping Thought is reconciled with the Catholic confession that the Church receives her constitution and mission from Christ.
Indeed, Rome routinely asks traditional candidates questions of comparable or greater severity concerning their reception of the Council, the legitimacy of the liturgical reform, religious liberty and ecclesial communion. There is no principled reason why bishops emerging from the Patriotic system should be exempt from equally searching scrutiny regarding an ecclesiology Benedict XVI himself condemned.
Nor should criticism of the Vatican agreement become an excuse for cheap judgment of Catholics who live under Communist rule. A priest ministering under surveillance has moral difficulties unknown to Catholics comfortably writing from Britain, France or America. Heroism may exist within the recognised structures as well as outside them. Some concessions may be attempts to preserve the Mass, protect seminarians, keep churches open or prevent harsher persecution. One should be exceedingly careful before attributing cowardice or apostasy to men whose actual freedom may be severely circumscribed.
But exactly the same pastoral charity should be extended towards traditional Catholics. Catholics attached to the Society are too often discussed as though their primary spiritual motivation were enjoyment of rebellion. Many were born into its communities; others went there because diocesan bishops denied them access to traditional worship; others encountered there the doctrinal clarity, sacramental seriousness and ascetical life they believed absent elsewhere. They may have drawn incorrect canonical conclusions. But their consciences are no less deserving of intelligent pastoral treatment than those of Catholics navigating Communist religious policy.
The comparison thus becomes not merely juridical but pastoral. Rome understands why Catholics under political pressure may make accommodations in order to preserve sacramental life. It ought therefore to understand why Catholics who experienced the post-conciliar destruction of inherited liturgy, catechesis, religious life and priestly formation concluded—rightly or wrongly—that extraordinary measures were necessary to preserve those things. One may dispute their diagnosis. It is no longer credible to pretend that the crisis itself was imaginary.
Pope Leo XIV did not create the Vatican–China agreement. He inherited it. But inherited policies become one’s own when one chooses to implement them. The July appointments show that the mechanism is functioning under his authority, not merely lingering as a Francis-era arrangement awaiting review. Leo has now approved the candidatures of men formed and promoted within the very structures whose constitutional character raises the Benedictine objections outlined above.¹ ²
The responsibility therefore lies with this pontificate to explain how those objections have been answered. What is now the doctrinal status of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association? How does Rome understand the current statutes of the body styling itself the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China? Can an episcopal conference properly be required by its constitution to support the leadership of an atheistic political party? How does Rome reconcile its own authority in appointments with that body’s published competence to examine and approve candidates? What meaning does Rome now attach to the principle of “independent” Church administration? What safeguards exist for bishops who refuse ideological demands? What protection exists for underground Catholics who cannot in conscience participate in the recognised structures?
These questions are not manufactured by enemies of Pope Leo XIV. They arise from official Chinese Catholic documents read against the doctrinal standard articulated by Pope Benedict XVI.
Leo should answer them. He should also reconsider Rome’s approach towards Écône. He need surrender nothing of the Petrine office by doing so. Authority becomes more credible, not less, when it distinguishes ideological rejection of its divine basis from a disputed appeal to necessity by those who profess that basis. The Society insists that its canonical problem is downstream from a doctrinal problem. Rome cannot indefinitely answer a doctrinal diagnosis merely by intensifying canonical penalties.
That does not canonise the SSPX. It does not excuse every exercise of disobedience. It does not make Chang or Duan personally responsible for the Communist system into which they were born. It restores proportion.
Illicit episcopal consecration is a grave wound to ecclesiastical order. The political domestication of the episcopate is a grave wound to libertas Ecclesiae. A claim of necessity may be erroneous. The principle that Christ rather than the state constitutes the Church can never become erroneous.
The tragedy, therefore, is not that Beijing seeks control over Catholic life. Every totalising state seeks control over institutions whose final loyalties transcend the state. Communist governments have repeatedly manufactured patriotic religious structures, rewarded compliant clergy and isolated communities unwilling to accept political supremacy. Nothing about that should surprise us.
Nor is the tragedy simply that Rome talks to Beijing. Popes must sometimes negotiate with persecutors. Prudence is not cowardice. Diplomacy may preserve churches, sacraments and human lives which heroic gestures from comfortable offices would sacrifice. The Holy See is entitled to make painful prudential judgments in circumstances where every available choice may involve serious evils.
The tragedy would be if Rome forgot which of the parties ultimately requires conversion.
China does not need a Catholic Church made safe for Communism. It needs the Catholic Church in the freedom Christ gave her. A genuine Sinicisation would allow the Gospel to take flesh within Chinese civilisation; it would not require the Gospel to pass an ideological examination conducted according to Xi Jinping Thought. Catholics should become more profoundly Chinese by becoming more profoundly Catholic, not less Catholic in order to become more politically acceptable.
And the Church does not need traditional Catholics taught that attachment to her inherited faith and worship constitutes a greater threat to communion than institutional principles Benedict XVI described as incompatible with Catholic doctrine.
The Pope is right to defend his prerogatives against bishops who would make the papal mandate meaningless. He must be equally determined to defend those prerogatives against governments which would make their exercise politically conditional. Peter cannot be treated as absolute at Écône and negotiable at Beijing.
This is why the juxtaposition is so uncomfortable. Écône resists particular acts of Roman government while appealing, however controversially, to the Church’s received Tradition and professing Roman primacy. The Chinese Patriotic structure operates under statutes requiring support for an atheistic ruling Party and a political programme governing the adaptation of Catholic life to socialist society. Yet contemporary Rome appears to reserve its most uncompromising ecclesiology for the former and its most elastic diplomacy for the latter.
History will not finally judge the Vatican–Beijing agreement by the elegance of its communiqués. It will ask whether the Church remained free. It will ask whether bishops remained successors of the Apostles before they became politically acceptable religious administrators. It will ask whether Catholics who suffered rather than surrender the freedom of the Church were vindicated or quietly rendered obsolete. And it will ask whether Peter defended the Church against Caesar as vigorously as he disciplined his own sons.
Benedict XVI supplied the test. The principles of ecclesiastical independence, autonomy, self-management and democratic administration promoted by the state-created Chinese structures were incompatible with Catholic doctrine. The present statutes still proclaim independent administration while adding Communist Party leadership, Xi Jinping Thought, the socialist system and Sinicisation. Rome cannot indefinitely behave as though the doctrinal problem disappeared merely because a confidential diplomatic agreement was signed in 2018.
If Leo XIV believes that subsequent developments have resolved Benedict’s objections, he should tell the Church how. He can clarify what changed, disclose as much of the agreement as genuine diplomatic prudence permits, defend the actual freedom of Chinese bishops, protect Catholics who cannot submit in conscience to the Patriotic structures and establish unmistakable limits beyond which Communist political participation becomes intolerable interference in the government of Christ’s Church. At the same time, he can engage Écône with the doctrinal seriousness and patient realism Rome so readily recognises as necessary elsewhere.
None of this would weaken papal authority. It would reveal what papal authority is for.
For almost two thousand years, Caesar has wanted bishops he could trust. Sometimes he offered palaces, sometimes prisons; sometimes investiture, sometimes concordats, sometimes civil constitutions, sometimes patriotic associations. The Church survived because, amid every compromise and every human failure, she continued to know that the successors of the Apostles belonged ultimately to Christ.
The most disturbing fact before us, therefore, is not that the Chinese Communist Party wishes to influence Catholic bishops. Tyrants have always wanted compliant shepherds.
The disturbing fact is that Rome appears more alarmed by bishops formed entirely within the Catholic Tradition than by an ecclesiastical apparatus whose own statutes require support for Communist Party leadership and whose governing principles a Pope has already described as incompatible with Catholic doctrine.
Until Leo XIV resolves that contradiction, Rome’s red line will continue to appear to run through Écône rather than Beijing.
And after Benedict XVI’s warning, it becomes harder and harder to escape the conclusion that it has been drawn in precisely the wrong place.
¹ Holy See Press Office, “Resignations and Appointments: Consecration of Bishop of Chifeng, China,” 22 July 2026.
² Vatican News, “China: Bameng diocesan vicar Duan Yongkun ordained Coadjutor Bishop,” 29 July 2026.
³ Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, Statutes of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, adopted by the Tenth National Congress of Chinese Catholics, 20 August 2022, arts. 3–6.
⁴ Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China, Statutes, adopted by the Tenth National Congress of Chinese Catholics, 20 August 2022, arts. 3–6.
⁵ Ibid., arts. 8–9, 16–18.
⁶ Chinese Catholic official website, “Catholic Diocese of Chifeng Holds Consecration Ceremony for Bishop Chang Yanfeng,” 22 July 2026.
⁷ Chinese Catholic official website, “Inner Mongolia Catholic Diocese of Chifeng Organises Study of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Speech and the Code of Conduct for Religious Clergy Online,” 16 October 2025.
⁸ Chinese Catholic official website, “Bayannur Diocese and Bayannur Catholic ‘Two Associations’ Hold Online Study Conference on the Spirit of the 20th Party Congress,” 29 November 2022.
⁹ Chinese Catholic official website, “Third Congress of Catholics in Bayannur, Inner Mongolia,” 30 January 2026.
¹⁰ Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of the Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of China, 27 May 2007, no. 7.
¹¹ Ibid., no. 7 and n. 36.
¹² Ibid., no. 8.
¹³ Holy See Press Office, “Communiqué: Eighth Assembly of Chinese Catholic Representatives,” 17 December 2010.
¹⁴ Leo XIII, Encyclical Immortale Dei, 1 November 1885, nn. 10, 13, 33–35.
¹⁵ Pius X, Encyclical Vehementer Nos, 11 February 1906.
¹⁶ Holy See Press Office, “Communiqué on the extension of the Provisional Agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China regarding the appointment of bishops,” 22 October 2024.
¹⁷ Reuters, “Vatican and China extend deal over Catholic bishop appointments,” 22 October 2024.
¹⁸ Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Decree and Explanatory Note concerning the Society of Saint Pius X episcopal consecrations, 2 July 2026; L’Osservatore Romano, 6 July 2026.
¹⁹ Leo XIII, Encyclical Satis Cognitum, 29 June 1896.
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