Hong Kong has upheld Cardinal Joseph Zen’s conviction. The offence was not religious and it was not prosecuted under the National Security Law. But eight years after Rome chose accommodation with Beijing, the fate of the Cardinal who warned that faithful Chinese Catholics were being pushed into a cage has become an unavoidable test of what that policy has actually achieved.
At ninety-four years of age, His Eminence ✠Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, S.D.B., has lost his appeal. On 3 September, Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal dismissed the challenges brought by the Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong and four other former trustees of the now-defunct 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund: barrister and former legislator Margaret Ng, former legislator Cyd Ho, singer Denise Ho and academic Hui Po-keung. Their 2022 convictions and fines of HK$4,000 each therefore stand. In financial terms, the penalty is modest. In everything the case represents, it is anything but. The Chinese Cardinal who spent years warning Rome that accommodation with Beijing risked placing faithful Catholics under structures they had resisted precisely in order to preserve their Catholic freedom has once again emerged from a Hong Kong courtroom as a convicted man.¹
That statement requires an immediate qualification because Nuntiatoria has no need of exaggeration where the facts themselves are sufficiently disturbing. ✠Cardinal Zen was not convicted under Hong Kong’s National Security Law. He and several others connected with the 612 Fund were arrested in May 2022 by national-security police on suspicion of colluding with foreign forces, but Zen was never charged with that offence. The case that went to trial concerned the much narrower Societies Ordinance. The prosecution maintained that the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, established in June 2019 to provide legal, medical, psychological and emergency financial assistance to people affected by the protests, constituted a “society” and therefore should have registered, or sought exemption from registration, within the period required by law. The Fund ceased operations in October 2021. In November 2022 the five trustees were convicted of failing to register it between July 2019 and October 2021; the Fund’s former secretary, Sze Ching-wee, was separately fined HK$2,500 and did not join the present appeal.²
The Court of Appeal has now upheld the lower court’s interpretation. Judges Jeremy Poon, Aarif Barma and Derek Pang rejected the contention that the Fund amounted merely to money held upon trust rather than an association falling within the statutory definition of a society. They concluded that the trustees had employed it as a vehicle to solicit, collect and distribute donations in connection with the 2019 protest movement, and they rejected the argument that requiring such a body to register imposed an impermissible burden upon freedom of association. The implications are sufficiently important that Margaret Ng announced after the judgment that the defendants intend to seek recourse to Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, precisely because the judgment raises the wider question of how readily citizens acting together for a common purpose may become a “society” required to register with the police.³
There is another qualification which a Catholic editorial ought to acknowledge. After his original conviction, ✠Cardinal Zen himself discouraged treating the case simply as a prosecution for religious freedom. His work with the 612 Fund was undertaken as a Hong Kong citizen assisting people in need, not as the official activity of the Diocese of Hong Kong or as an exercise of his episcopal ministry. The Court of Appeal has not convicted him for preaching Christ, offering Mass, defending the underground Church, rejecting Communist doctrine or criticising the Vatican’s China agreement. Conflating those matters would transform a serious argument into propaganda.
Yet the opposite error would be equally artificial. It would be absurd to pretend that the conviction of Joseph Zen can be understood in a political and ecclesial vacuum, as though this were merely a technical dispute about the paperwork of an elderly charity trustee. The five defendants were originally arrested by national-security police. The Fund existed because of the enormous political rupture produced by Hong Kong’s 2019 protests. Its activities were subsequently examined against the background of the National Security Law imposed in 2020 and the far-reaching contraction of organised political opposition and civil society that followed. Zen himself remains not merely an elderly Hong Kong citizen but a Chinese Catholic bishop, a Prince of the Church created Cardinal by Benedict XVI, and one of the most persistent witnesses against the subjection of Catholic ecclesial life to Communist political control. The legal offence may not have been religious. The identity of the man, the circumstances in which he was first arrested and the regime against whose ecclesiastical ambitions he has warned for decades cannot simply be wished away.
That matters because Zen’s great warning was never that Rome must refuse all communication with Beijing. It was that diplomatic normalisation could become ecclesiastical surrender if the underground Catholics who had resisted Communist control were compelled, in the name of unity, to enter structures subject to that same control. His most memorable image was the cage. In 2018, when Vatican diplomacy was arguing that negotiations might enlarge the space in which Chinese Catholics could live, Zen replied that the real question was not how large the birdcage became but who was being placed inside it. The underground faithful, he argued, had remained outside that cage. What he feared was that Rome itself would help Beijing put them into it. This was not an incidental metaphor attached retrospectively to the controversy. It was his diagnosis before the Provisional Agreement was signed.⁴
The agreement came in September 2018. Its text has remained confidential. It was renewed in 2020 and 2022, and in October 2024 the Holy See extended it for a further four years. The Vatican communiqué said that Rome remained committed to “respectful and constructive dialogue” with the Chinese authorities for the further development of bilateral relations and “for the benefit of the Catholic Church in China and the Chinese people as a whole.” That is the Holy See’s own criterion. After eight years, therefore, the agreement is entitled to be judged not merely according to the diplomatic difficulties confronting those who negotiated it, but according to whether it has actually benefited the supernatural liberty, doctrinal integrity and apostolic government of the Church in China.⁵
Nuntiatoria has been asking that question repeatedly. In April, in Beijing’s terms, Rome’s signature: the China deal and the cost of unity read the Nuntiatoria editorial, we examined the danger that what had been presented as reconciliation was becoming a quiet absorption of underground Catholic life into officially recognised structures. In August, Rome’s Red Line Runs Through Écône, Not Beijing read the Nuntiatoria editorial examined the present statutes governing China’s recognised Catholic establishment and the degree to which Communist Party leadership, Xi Jinping Thought, “independence and autonomy” and the state’s programme of Sinicisation are embedded within the institutional environment from which episcopal candidates emerge. The point was deliberately more substantial than the simplistic claim that “Beijing appoints bishops”. Pope Leo XIV genuinely appoints bishops within the framework of the agreement, and his final canonical act matters. The deeper question is what kind of ecclesiastical organism determines which priests can minister openly, acquire institutional standing, become candidates, participate in state-recognised episcopal elections and arrive before Rome as politically viable choices.
That question cannot be dismissed as ideological paranoia because Pope Benedict XVI stated the governing Catholic principle with remarkable clarity. In his 2007 Letter to Chinese Catholics he warned against entities “desired by the State and extraneous to the structure of the Church” placing themselves above bishops and directing ecclesial life. More decisively, he declared that the principles of “independence and autonomy, self-management and democratic administration of the Church” were “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” The preaching of the Gospel, catechesis, charitable activity, worship and pastoral government, Benedict insisted, belong to the bishops with their priests in continuity with apostolic Faith and therefore “cannot be subject to any external interference.”⁶ Nuntiatoria developed the historical implications of that principle in The Constitutional Church and the Patriotic Church: The Lesson Rome Forgot read the Nuntiatoria editorial. The comparison with revolutionary France was not made because Communist China and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy are identical. It was made because both controversies expose the same ecclesiological question: may the State construct the machinery within which Catholic episcopal government must operate and then call the resulting arrangement ecclesiastical normality?
Only days ago that question became more acute. In The Bishops in the Shadows: China, Écône, and the Question Rome Cannot Avoid read the Nuntiatoria investigation, we examined reports from Fujian that an underground Chinese bishop had described the present situation as a “state of emergency”, amid fears that increasing governmental influence upon bishops would compromise “the integrity of the Catholic faith”. According to the account reported by historian Anthony E. Clark, secret episcopal consecrations have taken place specifically to “assure the survival of China’s Church”. We said then what responsible journalism still requires us to say now: we do not know whether those consecrations possessed secret pontifical mandates. But either answer is significant. If Rome authorised them, the Holy See apparently regards circumstances under its agreement with Beijing as sufficiently precarious to require a clandestine episcopate concealed from the Chinese State. If Rome did not authorise them, underground Catholics apparently believe the ordinary structures produced by the new settlement are insufficient to guarantee the Church’s survival. Neither possibility resembles the uncomplicated normalisation which supporters of the agreement once hoped it would achieve.
Place ✠Cardinal Zen beside that evidence and the significance of today’s judgment changes. Here is the man who warned before the agreement that Rome risked pushing the underground faithful into a cage. Here are Catholic institutions which Benedict XVI had already warned could embody principles incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Here is an agreement intended above all to resolve the episcopal crisis and restore normality. Here are underground Catholics, eight years later, reportedly speaking again of a “state of emergency”, fearing political interference with episcopal integrity and resorting to bishops in the shadows. And here, today, is the ninety-four-year-old Cardinal who warned Rome of precisely the danger of Communist political absorption, leaving a Hong Kong court with his conviction intact after first having been arrested by national-security police.
None of this proves that the Court of Appeal convicted Zen because he is a Catholic bishop. It proves something different and more relevant to the present ecclesiastical debate: the political system with which Vatican diplomacy has chosen accommodation continues to demonstrate why Zen believed the freedom of the Church could not safely be entrusted to diplomatic optimism. His court case is therefore not evidence that the Vatican–China agreement caused his prosecution. It is evidence of the political environment within which that agreement is expected to protect Catholic freedom. The distinction matters. So does the conclusion.
Indeed, Pope Leo XIV cannot simply be blamed for the policy he inherited. The agreement was conceived and repeatedly defended under Pope Francis. Leo has nevertheless chosen to continue implementing it through episcopal appointments made “within the framework” of the Provisional Agreement, and therefore its consequences are now part of his pontificate. There is also an important difference in Leo’s personal treatment of Zen which fairness requires Nuntiatoria to acknowledge. On 7 January this year, during the Pope’s first extraordinary consistory, Leo received the Cardinal privately. Zen subsequently described a warm conversation of roughly half an hour and expressed gratitude for the Pope’s attentiveness. He was also permitted to speak forcefully during the consistory itself. That is not insignificant after years in which the Cardinal’s relationship with the previous Vatican administration had been strained. Leo has listened to the prophet. The question is whether he will now examine the prophecy.⁷
For Zen’s argument has never principally concerned his own treatment. This is precisely what makes him so troublesome to those who would reduce the China question to diplomatic technique. He speaks for a memory which administrative normalisation can too easily suppress: bishops imprisoned rather than submit to state domination; priests offering Mass clandestinely; lay Catholics preserving communion with Rome under circumstances in which official recognition might require compromises they could not make; and generations who understood that libertas Ecclesiae is not an optional political preference but follows from what the Church is. A bishop governs by apostolic authority in communion with Peter, not because the Communist Party has allocated him an approved religious function. A priest preaches Christ because he is sent by the Church, not because his proclamation has been harmonised with Xi Jinping Thought. Catholics may love China, serve China, pray for China and embody the Faith within Chinese civilisation. The Catholic Church may be entirely Chinese. She cannot be Communist.
There is nothing intrinsically scandalous about Vatican diplomacy recognising that reality must be approached prudently. The history of the Church contains concordats with emperors, monarchs, republics, dictatorships and regimes openly hostile to Catholic doctrine. The Holy See has often accepted imperfect arrangements to preserve episcopal succession, sacramental life and the possibility of future freedom. Diplomacy is not apostasy. An administrative compromise is not necessarily a doctrinal capitulation. Leo would be entitled to conclude that the China agreement remains the least damaging option available in circumstances where every alternative entails grave pastoral costs. But precisely because prudence deals in contingent judgments rather than revealed truths, prudential policies must be judged by their fruits and reconsidered when those fruits contradict the purpose for which the policy exists.
Eight years is long enough to begin that examination. The question is not whether some bishops have now been appointed with papal approval: they have. The question is whether the episcopate has become more genuinely free. It is not whether officially recognised Catholics can worship: many can. The question is whether the Church’s life remains governed according to Catholic ecclesiology rather than political supervision. It is not whether dialogue with Beijing continues: plainly it does. The question is what Rome has obtained in return for eight years of accommodation, repeated concessions and the continuing confidentiality of an agreement governing something as fundamental as apostolic succession.
Here Zen’s conviction assumes its proper symbolic weight. He does not need to be a martyr of the Societies Ordinance for the scene to disturb us. He does not need to have been convicted under the National Security Law for the original involvement of national-security police to matter. He does not need to claim religious persecution for Catholics to observe that one of the most senior Chinese churchmen of the age, a Cardinal who warned relentlessly about the character of Communist control, remains constrained within the legal and political order of Beijing-governed Hong Kong while Rome continues a policy predicated upon constructive accommodation with Beijing.
And this produces a particularly uncomfortable question for a pontificate increasingly obliged to distinguish the exercise of authority from its purpose. Nuntiatoria’s argument throughout the present crisis in the Church has been that legitimate means become destructive when transformed into ends. Administration exists for mission; participation exists for worship; ecclesiastical law exists for the salvation of souls; diplomacy exists for the freedom and mission of the Church. The survival of the Vatican–China agreement cannot therefore become a good superior to the goods the agreement was created to secure. If concern for maintaining dialogue makes Rome progressively more reluctant to identify Communist encroachment upon Catholic ecclesiology, then diplomacy has ceased to serve the Church and the Church has begun to serve diplomacy.
The Holy See’s own language supplies the test: “for the benefit of the Catholic Church in China.” What benefit? More episcopal appointments are not sufficient if the field from which bishops emerge remains politically conditioned. Canonical recognition is not sufficient if ecclesiastical government remains vulnerable to external interference. Public churches are not sufficient if the price of publicity is ideological conformity. Administrative unity is not sufficient if Catholics who suffered for the independence of the Church discover that the structure they resisted has effectively become the structure into which Rome expects them to be reconciled. Unity is a Catholic good because it is unity in truth and charity under Christ. Unity with a cage remains a cage.
This is why the question Leo XIV should now ask is not whether Joseph Zen has been correct about every detail of Vatican diplomacy. No statesman, bishop or commentator enjoys such infallibility. Nor should Zen’s age, courage or sufferings immunise his judgments from criticism. The proper question is narrower and more devastating: was he right about the central danger? Was the underground Church at risk of being required to surrender precisely what its clandestinity had preserved? Has Rome’s pursuit of an administratively unified Chinese Catholicism progressively transferred the burden of concession from an atheistic state onto Catholics who resisted that state? Has the secrecy surrounding the episcopal agreement prevented the universal Church from knowing whether Beijing has actually surrendered any of the ecclesiological principles Benedict XVI found incompatible with Catholic doctrine? And has Rome, having invested enormous diplomatic capital in the agreement, become less willing to admit evidence that the policy may not be producing the freedom it promised?
Leo now has an opportunity which his predecessor did not take. He has met Zen. He has listened to him. He has inherited the agreement but did not create it. He can therefore reassess it without pretending that dialogue itself was illegitimate. He can ask whether Chinese bishops are genuinely free to govern as Catholic bishops. He can insist that underground clergy who cannot in conscience enter state-supervised structures are not treated as ecclesiastical embarrassments to be regularised out of existence. He can clarify the limits beyond which Sinicisation ceases to mean legitimate inculturation and becomes ideological domestication. He can explain how the existing machinery of episcopal selection answers Benedict XVI’s ecclesiological objections. And he can demand from Beijing what every Pope owes the Church when negotiating with Caesar: not privilege, but freedom to be what Christ constituted her to be.
Today’s judgment does not settle those questions. Nor does it make ✠Cardinal Zen’s legal argument automatically correct. His case may yet reach the Court of Final Appeal, and it should be reported according to what that court actually decides. Nuntiatoria will not convert a registration conviction into a fictitious prosecution for the Catholic Faith merely because such a story would be rhetorically convenient.
The truth is more powerful.
A ninety-four-year-old Cardinal has lost his appeal. He was first arrested by national-security police, though never prosecuted under the National Security Law. He remains convicted for failing to register a humanitarian fund connected with Hong Kong’s 2019 protest movement. He is also the Chinese bishop who told Rome, before its agreement with Beijing, that underground Catholics were being pushed into a cage. Eight years later, the agreement remains secret; Communist political supervision of recognised religious life remains; the principles Benedict XVI identified as incompatible with Catholic doctrine have not demonstrably vanished from the state-sanctioned ecclesiastical system; underground Catholics are again reported to fear for the integrity of their Faith; clandestine episcopal consecrations are again being reported; and the man who warned Rome about the cage is still the man walking out of court.
The HK$4,000 fine is therefore almost beside the point. The more consequential judgment has still to be made, and it concerns not Joseph Zen but the policy he opposed.
Rome has spent eight years trying to make the cage larger.
Perhaps the time has come to ask why Catholics should have been put inside it at all.
¹ Associated Press, Kanis Leung, “Hong Kong court upholds convictions of Cardinal Joseph Zen and others over protester relief fund,” 3 September 2026. Associated Press report
² The Pillar, Michelle La Rosa, “Hong Kong appeals court rejects Zen’s appeal in relief fund case,” 3 September 2026; Associated Press, 3 September 2026. The Pillar report
³ Associated Press, 3 September 2026; Los Angeles Times/Associated Press, 3 September 2026. Appeal judgment report and defendants’ proposed further appeal
⁴ ✠Cardinal Joseph Zen, comments concerning the proposed Vatican–China settlement and the “birdcage”, February–March 2018; AsiaNews, 6 February 2018; Crux, 6 February 2018. Zen’s contemporary intervention on the cage analogy Contemporary Crux report
⁵ 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. Holy See communiqué
⁶ 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. Vatican text of Benedict XVI’s Letter
⁷ ZENIT, “This is Cardinal Joseph Zen’s controversial speech during the last consistory,” 12 January 2026; contemporary reports of the Cardinal’s private audience with Leo XIV on 7 January 2026. Report on Zen’s audience and consistory intervention
⁸ Nuntiatoria, Beijing’s terms, Rome’s signature: the China deal and the cost of unity, 17 April 2026. Nuntiatoria article
⁹ Nuntiatoria, Rome’s Red Line Runs Through Écône, Not Beijing, 7 August 2026; The Constitutional Church and the Patriotic Church: The Lesson Rome Forgot, 14 August 2026. Rome’s Red Line Runs Through Écône, Not Beijing The Constitutional Church and the Patriotic Church
¹⁰ Nuntiatoria, The Bishops in the Shadows: China, Écône, and the Question Rome Cannot Avoid, 28 August 2026. The Bishops in the Shadows
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