Thursday, September 27, 2018

Mary Help of Christians Watches over Dialog Between Church and China

Mary Help of Christians Watches over Dialog Between Church and China

(ANS – Vatican City – September 27) – In the end, Pope Francis could entrust only to Mary Help of Christians a mission so important and delicate. On the occasion of the Provisional Agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China, and at the conclusion of his pastoral letter to the faithful in China, Pope Francis delivered into the care of the Celestial Mother this further step of rapprochement between the Vatican and Beijing. Pope Francis has paid homage every 24th of the month even as archbishop of Buenos Aires to the Madonna of Don Bosco, the Virgin to whom the millions of Catholics in China also are closely linked. 

The Provisional Agreement arrives after long years of preparatory work. “It is God’s time, which resembles Chinese time: it’s slow” Pope Francis joked, but just a little, on his way back from Estonia to the Vatican.

The agreement has been a negotiation in which, as the Pope has always explained, both parties have had to give up something. For some it is also a source of “doubts and perplexities”: even the Pontiff admitted this in his letter, perhaps because those who have endured for years the difficulties and problems of living in the “underground Church” now are questioning “the value of the sufferings they faced to live in fidelity to the Successor of Peter.”

The Holy Father does not ignore those Catholics: “Such painful experiences belong to the spiritual treasure of the Church in China and of the whole People of God.” Yet he looks to China “as a land full of great opportunities and to the Chinese people as the architect and guardian of an inestimable heritage of culture and wisdom.”

On the specific theme of the appointment of bishops, the Pope assures “that the nomination is from Rome; the appointment is by the Pope,” and the dialog concerns the antecedent phase, the identification of the candidates. In any case, the agreement represents a turning point for the Catholic Church in China because for the first time, it introduces stable elements of collaboration and because it proceeds in the direction of reconstituting the full and visible unity of the Church.

“Dialog is a risk, but I prefer the risk to the sure defeat of not talking,” the Holy Father had said months ago. And for the future, there is always something to look up to: “Mary, Help of Christians, for China we ask you for days of blessing and peace.” That is the conclusion of the prayer signed by Pope Francis for this special mission.


America magazine offers interesting parallels between the agreement just reached between the Holy See and China, and the 1801 Concordat between the Holy See and Napoleon.

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