Vatican Abandons Chinese

A cardinal who compared the Vatican’s concordat with China to a deal with Adolf Hitler has just been arrested. Yet Pope Francis does not seem to care.

The most senior Catholic cleric in China delivered a sobering warning five years ago. When news broke that the Vatican was negotiating a secret concordat to give the Chinese Communist Party a role in appointing Catholic bishops, Cardinal Joseph Zen warned that the deal would be “betraying Jesus Christ.”

“Maybe the pope is a little naive; he doesn’t have the background to know the Communists in China,” Zen told the Guardian Unlimited in November 2016. “You cannot go into negotiations with the mentality ‘we want to sign an agreement at any cost,’ then you are surrendering yourself, you are betraying yourself, you are betraying Jesus Christ. If you cannot get a good deal, an acceptable deal, then the Vatican should walk away and maybe try again later. Could the church negotiate with Hitler? Could it negotiate with Stalin? No.”

Read more at “The Vatican Abandons Chinese Catholics”

Official Religion of Imperial China

A long process made the “Way of the Ru” an ideology governing the bureaucracy, education, and the imperial rites. The label “official religion” may however be misleading.

This is not a history of “Confucianism,” much less a systematic presentation of its doctrines, which extend to such diverse fields as morality, music, and politics. The much more limited purpose of this series is to discuss whether the tradition of the Ru commonly associated with the name of Confucius can be regarded as “religious” or, on the contrary, as “atheistic.”

Read more at “Confucianism: Atheism or Religion? 4. The Official Religion of Imperial China”