The Vatican’s secretary of state said the Holy See hoped to renew its 2018 provisional agreement with the Chinese government for the third time this year, and to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.
“We have been hoping for a long time to be able to have a stable diplomatic presence in China,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin during a conference in Rome to mark the centenary of the Concilium Sinense, the synod in Shanghai that advanced the inculturation of the Church in China.
Parolin said the Holy See was not bound to one model of representation. “The form can be different, let’s not fixate on only one thing,” he said on 21 May.
A statement from the Chinese foreign ministry the next day said it was “willing to work together with the Vatican to promote the continuous improvement of China-Vatican relations” and that they maintained “deep communication on bilateral relations and international hot issues”.
The Vatican is one of only a few states to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which the Chinese government considers a separatist province. It has subjected the island to increased diplomatic and economic pressure since Taiwan’s January elections, when voters broadly returned candidates – including Lai Ching-te as president – opposed to conciliation of Beijing.
In its own response to Parolin’s remarks, the Taiwanese foreign ministry said: “We understand that the Holy See hopes to promote the freedom of belief and rights of Chinese Catholics, and has publicly expressed its desire to send representatives to China many times.”
However, it insisted that Beijing had “repeatedly violated” the 2018 agreement and had “clamped down on religious freedom”.
The response also affirmed Taipei’s relationship with the Holy See. Taiwan’s deputy environment minister met Pope Francis the previous week during a climate conference at the Vatican, while the apostolic nuncio attended President Lai’s inauguration on 20 May, it said.
Contributors to last week’s centenary conference credited Archbishop Celso Costantini, the first apostolic delegate to China, with renewing the Church there in the 1920s. In a video address to open the conference, Pope Francis said it was through his was efforts that “the communion between the Holy See and the Church in China manifested its fertile fruits”.
Costantini himself argued that “such communion is the best guarantee of a faith shielded from external political interests and firmly anchored in local culture and society”.
The Bishop of Shanghai Joseph Shen Bin, whom the Vatican confirmed in his see last July after the Beijing authorities installed him without reference to Rome, also attended the conference. He is the president of the state-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
Shen Bin said the Church in China must follow “a path of sinicisation that aligns with today’s Chinese society and culture” as it pursued “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation comprehensively with a modernisation of Chinese style”.