THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHURCH AND THE PATRIOTIC CHURCH: The Lesson Rome Forgot
The Vatican–China agreement is usually presented as an exceptionally difficult problem of ecclesiastical diplomacy: how can the Holy See secure legitimate bishops for millions of Catholics living under an authoritarian State with which it has no diplomatic relations? Put in those terms, the policy can appear almost inevitable. China will not surrender its interest in religious appointments; Rome cannot permit a permanent succession of bishops outside canonical communion; the faithful require pastors and sacraments. Yet Catholic history provides an older and much more uncomfortable way of understanding the problem. To grasp why so many of China’s underground Catholics regard the present accommodation with anxiety, one should go back not merely to Mao or the establishment of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association in 1957, but to France in 1790.
The French Revolution did not begin by abolishing Catholicism. It attempted something more subtle and, from the standpoint of Catholic ecclesiology, more radical: to reconstruct the Church as a national institution subject in decisive matters to the revolutionary State. Having confiscated ecclesiastical property, the National Assembly enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy on 12 July 1790. Dioceses were reorganised according to the new civil départements; their number was reduced; bishops and parish priests were to be elected according to procedures laid down by the revolutionary legislature; and clergy became salaried public functionaries. Most revealingly, a newly elected bishop was not to seek canonical institution from the Pope in the traditional manner. Rome might remain the visible centre of universal Catholic communion, but the effective machinery by which the French hierarchy was constituted had been transferred to another authority.¹
That was the essential point. The Revolution did not initially demand that French Catholics cease mentioning the Pope or publicly denounce him. It attempted instead to alter what papal authority actually did. The Pope could remain a revered symbol of unity provided that the revolutionary State controlled the structures through which bishops and clergy were selected and legally recognised. The Civil Constitution was therefore never merely a matter of administrative tidiness, diocesan boundaries or clerical remuneration. It touched the constitution of the Church herself, because it placed within the competence of the civil power matters which Catholic ecclesiology regarded as belonging intrinsically to the Church.
The crisis became unavoidable when the clergy were required to swear fidelity to “the Nation, the Law and the King” and to maintain the revolutionary constitutional settlement.² Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution and the episcopal arrangements arising from it.³ Every cleric was therefore confronted with a choice which could no longer be obscured by political language. He might accept the new ecclesiastical order and remain within the structures protected by the State, or refuse and accept the consequences. Those who swore became the prêtres jureurs, the “juring” or constitutional clergy; those who refused became the réfractaires, the refractory or non-juring priests. Only seven of the roughly 160 French bishops accepted the oath, while among the lower clergy the division was far closer and varied considerably by region.⁴ What appeared on paper as constitutional reform soon became visible in ordinary Catholic life: the constitutional priest possessed the parish church, the official appointment and the State salary; the refractory priest might find himself displaced, celebrating Mass in a private house or barn for parishioners who continued to regard him, rather than the State-approved replacement, as their true pastor.⁵
The Revolution then proceeded according to its own logic. Refractory priests were threatened with deportation, imprisoned, driven into hiding and, during the Terror, killed. The religious division was not the sole cause of the Vendée rising, but it was one of its central causes. Rural Catholics who might have tolerated substantial political upheaval proved considerably less willing to tolerate the removal of their priests and the substitution of clergy whom they regarded as creatures of the revolutionary settlement.⁶ The State had attempted to solve an ecclesiastical problem by reorganising the Church. It instead produced a schism which entered villages, parishes and families, and in doing so exposed the deeper question which every conflict of this kind eventually reaches: does the Church receive her constitution from Christ through her own hierarchy, or from the political order within which she happens to exist?
The comparison with China must be handled carefully. A prêtre jureur in 1791 and a priest serving within today’s State-recognised Chinese Catholic structures are not automatically moral equivalents. The historical circumstances are different; the canonical circumstances are different; individual Chinese bishops and priests have operated under greatly varying degrees of pressure, uncertainty and personal fidelity. Many bishops associated with the official structures sought or eventually obtained communion with Rome. Some were themselves subjected to considerable coercion. No serious analysis should turn an analogy between systems into a blanket judgement upon individual consciences. But at the level of political ecclesiology the resemblance remains striking, because in each case the State claimed a decisive role in determining the conditions under which Catholic ministry could enjoy legal existence.
In revolutionary France, compliance with the State’s ecclesiastical settlement brought legality and refusal produced exclusion. In Communist China, Catholicism has likewise been permitted public institutional existence only within a political framework in which the State insists upon supervision of organised religion. After the Communist victory, pressure mounted upon Chinese Catholics to detach ecclesiastical administration from foreign authority, especially Rome. In 1957 the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association was established as the recognised instrument through which Catholic religious life was to function, and the language repeatedly used was that of “independence,” “autonomy” and “self-administration.” Pope Benedict XVI later identified precisely the doctrinal difficulty: such principles, if understood as independence from the Holy See in matters belonging to the constitution of the Church, are incompatible with Catholic ecclesiology.⁷
What followed is well known. Bishops were elected and consecrated without pontifical mandate; other bishops remained faithful to direct communion with Rome and exercised their ministry clandestinely. The resulting distinction between the State-recognised and underground Catholic communities was never as clean as later shorthand sometimes suggests, but it was real. Rome sought reconciliation with many bishops in the official structures while simultaneously sustaining bishops and priests whose refusal to submit to State ecclesiastical control had left them without legal standing. Few men embodied the cost of that refusal more completely than Ignatius Kung Pin-mei, Bishop of Shanghai.
Kung became Bishop of Shanghai in 1950, just as the Communist regime was consolidating its power. He refused demands that Chinese Catholicism be separated from the authority of Rome. In September 1955 he was arrested during the great assault upon Catholic clergy and lay organisations in Shanghai, and he remained imprisoned for decades before receiving a life sentence in 1960. During one public confrontation with his persecutors he uttered the words with which his name remains inseparably associated: **“Long live Christ the King! Long live the Pope!”**⁸ Those words were not devotional embroidery. They expressed the ecclesiological issue for which Kung was prepared to lose his freedom. Christ is King; therefore the Church does not receive her supernatural constitution from the Communist Party. The Pope is the visible principle of Catholic unity; therefore the episcopate cannot be reduced to a national religious administration whose legitimacy depends ultimately upon State recognition. Kung spent approximately three decades in imprisonment and confinement, and John Paul II created him cardinal in pectore in 1979, revealing the appointment publicly in 1991.⁹ Rome thereby honoured not merely a man who had suffered, but a bishop whose suffering had been occasioned precisely by his refusal to exchange Roman communion for political accommodation.
That history is what makes September 2018 so difficult to treat as a purely technical diplomatic development. On 22 September 2018 the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China signed the Provisional Agreement regarding the appointment of bishops. The text remains unpublished. Claims that Beijing simply appoints bishops while the Pope retains a veto therefore go beyond what the public evidence permits us to state. What the Holy See itself says is that the agreement created “stable elements of cooperation” between the Chinese authorities and the Apostolic See concerning episcopal appointments. Francis subsequently described its purpose as providing the Catholic community with good shepherds and overcoming the divisions of the past.¹⁰ On the same day he regularised the ecclesiastical status of the remaining official bishops ordained without pontifical mandate. Eight bishops were named in the act of reconciliation, one of whom had already died after having expressed the wish to be reconciled with Rome.¹¹ The Pope could thereafter state, in January 2019, that for the first time in many years all the bishops in China were in communion with the Successor of Peter.¹²
That is the strongest argument for the agreement, and it should not be caricatured. A permanent division of the Chinese episcopate is not a Catholic ideal. Catholics require bishops in legitimate hierarchical communion. The Church cannot turn clandestinity into a permanent principle of ecclesiastical life merely because clandestine Catholics have displayed heroic fidelity. Popes have always negotiated with governments they did not trust and political systems they did not approve, and diplomacy may sometimes obtain, slowly and imperfectly, what open confrontation cannot. The French comparison itself demonstrates this. The schism created by the Civil Constitution did not continue indefinitely: Napoleon and Pius VII negotiated the Concordat of 1801, and the settlement imposed severe sacrifices. Pius VII requested the resignation of bishops belonging both to the ancien-régime hierarchy and to the revolutionary constitutional order so that a reorganised hierarchy might emerge. Rome did not simply restore France to the ecclesiastical position of 1789.¹³
But this is precisely where the historical analogy becomes useful rather than rhetorical. The question is not whether the Holy See may compromise over circumstances; plainly it may. The question is what principle survives the compromise. The Concordat of 1801 did not recognise a permanent revolutionary right to constitute the French episcopate independently of Rome. Whatever concessions Pius VII accepted, the settlement represented a recovery of canonical order from the revolutionary schism. The constitutional experiment was not ratified as a permanent model of Catholic ecclesiology. The Vatican–China agreement must therefore be tested by the same criterion: is it gradually liberating the Chinese Church from political interference, or is it gradually incorporating political interference into the normal operation of Catholic ecclesiastical government?
That question was already implicit in the Holy See’s own Pastoral Guidelines concerning the Civil Registration of Clergy in China, issued in June 2019. Rome acknowledged that clergy seeking civil recognition could be required to accept formulations concerning the “independence,” “autonomy” and “self-administration” of the Church. The Holy See attempted to interpret these expressions in a manner compatible with Catholic doctrine, namely as independence in the political rather than ecclesiological sphere, and recognised that clergy might register while making their Catholic understanding clear. At the same time it expressly acknowledged that some priests and bishops could not in conscience register and insisted that they should not therefore suffer intimidation.¹⁴ The dilemma could hardly be stated more clearly: a political formula exists; Catholic clergy must decide whether it can be interpreted consistently with the Faith; Rome searches for a permissible accommodation; those unable in conscience to make it remain outside the recognised structure. The similarity with the older constitutional problem lies there—not in declaring every State-recognised Chinese priest a modern jureur, but in the persistence of a system in which civil recognition of Catholic ministry is connected with acceptance of a political conception of how the Church must exist publicly.
Events since 2018 have made the distinction still more important. In November 2022 the Holy See publicly expressed “surprise and regret” when Bishop John Peng Weizhao was installed as auxiliary bishop of Jiangxi, an ecclesiastical jurisdiction which Rome did not recognise as such. The Vatican reported that his civil recognition had followed, according to information it had received, “prolonged and intense pressure” from local authorities.¹⁵ Whatever diplomatic euphemisms may be employed, the episode demonstrated that the Chinese authorities continued to act according to an ecclesiastical map and administrative conception not simply identical with Rome’s own. The following year exposed the problem still more sharply. In April 2023 the Chinese authorities transferred Bishop Joseph Shen Bin from Haimen to Shanghai without the Holy See having participated beforehand in the decision in the manner Rome understood the agreement to require. Francis subsequently appointed Shen Bishop of Shanghai for the pastoral good of the diocese. Cardinal Pietro Parolin openly acknowledged that the manner of the transfer appeared inconsistent with the “spirit of dialogue and collaboration” which the agreement was meant to establish.¹⁶ The sequence was revealing: Beijing acted, Rome objected to the procedure, and Rome ultimately regularised the result. That may have been pastorally prudent, but it was not evidence that political interference had disappeared.
Nevertheless, the agreement was renewed. After extensions in 2020 and 2022, the Holy See announced on 22 October 2024 that it had been prolonged for a further four years, and it therefore remains in force until October 2028.¹⁷ The arrangement has also survived the death of Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV. On 22 July 2026 Joseph Chang Yanfeng was consecrated Bishop of Chifeng after Leo XIV had appointed him on 15 June, the Holy See expressly recording that the Pope had approved his candidature “within the framework of the Provisional Agreement.”¹⁸ Whatever judgement eventually falls upon the policy, it can no longer be described as merely the personal Chinese experiment of Pope Francis. Leo XIV has inherited it and continues to act through it.
The Vatican’s defence therefore deserves its full weight. The agreement has brought bishops into recognised communion with Rome. It has created a mechanism through which appointments can occur without the open recurrence of episcopal consecrations repudiated by the Holy See. Rome explicitly insists that the special role and authority of the Bishop of Rome in episcopal appointments are now recognised within the process.¹⁹ The agreement may represent an imperfect opening through which greater ecclesiastical freedom can eventually be recovered. But that is not yet the same as demonstrating that the freedom of the Church has in fact been recovered, because the Catholic principle at stake has a traditional name: libertas Ecclesiae.
The freedom of the Church is not the demand that bishops possess political power or that Catholic institutions be exempt from every legitimate civil law. It is the freedom of the Church to be governed according to her own divine constitution: to receive and exercise ecclesiastical authority as the Church understands it, to maintain hierarchical communion with the Roman Pontiff, to teach her doctrine, to form her clergy, and to proclaim Christ without becoming an ideological instrument of the civil State. That is the principle by which the Chinese policy must finally be judged. If bishops become less vulnerable to unilateral political intervention, if dioceses become freer to maintain transparent communion with Rome, if clergy can minister without accepting formulations which require careful theological reinterpretation before they can be reconciled with Catholic ecclesiology, and if the State-recognised structure gradually loses its power to determine the legal existence of Catholic ministry, then the agreement may yet vindicate itself as a difficult but prudent exercise of ecclesiastical statesmanship. If, however, the underground Church disappears while the political mechanism which made an underground Church necessary remains intact, the judgement will necessarily be very different.
That is where the memory of Cardinal Kung becomes unavoidable. Kung did not suffer because he objected to diplomatic conversations with Beijing. He suffered because the State demanded something which he believed a Catholic bishop could not surrender, and Rome itself honoured him for refusing it. The central question therefore cannot be whether Catholic life becomes administratively easier. It must be whether the principle for which Kung suffered is progressively being secured. The same is true of the refractory clergy of revolutionary France. Their heroism did not consist in possessing a particular political preference. It consisted in recognising that civil authority had crossed from governing the temporal order into attempting to constitute the Church. The constitutional priest possessed what the State could give him: a recognised parish, an official position, legal security and a salary. The refractory priest could be left with a hidden altar and the danger of arrest. Catholic memory knows which sacrifice it honours.
That historical judgement does not give us permission to pronounce casually upon Chinese priests and bishops living under circumstances most Western Catholics have never experienced. It does, however, oblige Rome to ensure that those who refused political control were not merely preserving a principle which Vatican diplomacy would eventually allow to become obsolete. The decisive issue is therefore not whether Beijing and Rome can agree upon the same episcopal candidate. It is who possesses the right to govern the Church as Church. If the Provisional Agreement ultimately secures that right for the Church, it may yet prove itself an act of difficult ecclesiastical prudence. If it merely makes State supervision canonically manageable, the resemblance to 1790 becomes considerably darker.
For the Civil Constitution of the Clergy did not become objectionable because revolutionary France selected unusually poor episcopal candidates. It was objectionable because the State claimed a competence over the constitution of the Church which did not belong to it. That was what the refractory priests understood, and it was what Bishop Ignatius Kung understood when the prison doors closed behind him. His confession remains the measure by which every diplomatic accommodation must ultimately be tested: “Long live Christ the King! Long live the Pope!” Not the Party over the Church, not the State over the episcopate, not political recognition as the measure of Catholic legitimacy, but Christ the King, Peter as the visible centre of communion, and the Church free to be the Church. France discovered the cost of surrendering that distinction in 1790. China’s confessors have spent generations preserving it. Rome must ensure that reconciliation does not require their lesson to be forgotten.
¹ Constitution civile du clergé, 12 July 1790, Titles I–II; Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000).
² Decree of the National Assembly concerning the clerical oath, 27 November 1790; Constitution civile du clergé, Title II.
³ Pius VI, Quod aliquantum, 10 March 1791; Charitas quae, 13 April 1791.
⁴ Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
⁵ Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture; Aston, Religion and Revolution in France.
⁶ Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987); Donald M. G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
⁷ 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, especially §§7–9.
⁸ Cardinal Kung Foundation, biographical record of Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-mei; contemporary and subsequent biographical accounts of his arrest, trial and imprisonment.
⁹ Holy See, records of the College of Cardinals concerning Ignatius Kung Pin-mei; Cardinal Kung Foundation, biographical documentation.
¹⁰ Holy See Press Office, Communiqué concerning the signing of a Provisional Agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China on the appointment of Bishops, 22 September 2018; Francis, Message to the Catholics of China and to the Universal Church, 26 September 2018.
¹¹ Holy See Press Office, Briefing Note about the Catholic Church in China, 22 September 2018.
¹² Francis, Address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, 7 January 2019.
¹³ Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John W. O’Malley, A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present (Lanham: Sheed & Ward, 2010).
¹⁴ Holy See, Pastoral Guidelines concerning the Civil Registration of Clergy in China, 28 June 2019.
¹⁵ Holy See statement concerning the installation of Bishop John Peng Weizhao as auxiliary bishop of Jiangxi, 26 November 2022.
¹⁶ Pietro Cardinal Parolin, interview with Vatican Media concerning the appointment of Bishop Joseph Shen Bin to Shanghai, 15 July 2023.
¹⁷ Holy See Press Office, Communiqués extending the Provisional Agreement, 22 October 2020, 22 October 2022 and 22 October 2024.
¹⁸ Holy See Press Office, Consecration of Bishop of Chifeng, China, 22 July 2026.
¹⁹ Holy See, Pastoral Guidelines concerning the Civil Registration of Clergy in China, 28 June 2019; Francis, Message to the Catholics of China and to the Universal Church, 26 September 2018.
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