Is the Vatican’s China diplomacy strategy, or chaos?

Do the strands of papal diplomacy form a common thread, or is Beijing profiting from Rome's confused approaches?

The Vatican’s agreement with China on the appointment of bishops is set to be renewed in the coming months. 

While that project remains in the hands of the Secretariat of State, Pope Francis has been in recent months making more personal appeals to Beijing, both himself and through his “special envoy for peace,” Cardinal Matteo Zuppi.

But do those strands of papal diplomacy form a common thread, tying into a coherent set of priorities and goals for Vatican relations with China? Or are they working in isolation, handing Beijing an advantage through Roman confusion?

—

Almost since the moment the Vatican last renewed its agreement with China in 2022, its eventual extension by another two-year term was seen as an inevitability.

First struck in 2018, the deal was meant to bring the underground Catholic Church in China above ground, affording Catholics a measure of tolerance from state authorities while reconciling the bishops of the Communist Party-backed Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association with Rome.

The deal was also meant to clear the way for Rome and Beijing to work together more smoothly on the appointment of new bishops, allowing the dozens of vacant sees on the mainland to be filled.

Assessed on those three aims, the deal has proven, at best, a mixed success over the last six years. 

Far from enjoying tolerance by state authority, bishops and priests who have refused to take an oath affirming Communist Party supremacy over Church affairs have faced harassment, arrest, and in some cases, have simply “disappeared.” 

On the other hand, the reconciliation of the CPCA’s bishops to Rome, including those consecrated without a papal mandate has been a success, at least in as much as it has happened — Rome has declared those bishops to no longer be irregular. 

That being said, the role of the Holy See in the governance of the local Church is still formally unrecognized in the state-approved Church’s legal regulations, and senior CPCA bishops have exercised a level of autonomy from Rome unthinkable anywhere else — including effecting their own transfers between dioceses.

As for the smooth appointment of new bishops, the rate of new consecrations had been modest, at best. More problematic has been the actual mechanics of the Chinese state’s involvement in the process, with a procession of bishops being appointed and installed by unilateral Communist Party fiat, alongside mutually agreed appointments.

Even more problematic, from an ecclesiological perspective, have been moves by the Party to reorganize Church structures, suppressing dioceses and erecting new ones without Roman acknowledgment.

Given the limited, arguably backward, progress of the deal on its own supposed terms — bringing institutional stability to the Church in China and providing for the licit consecration of new bishops — it would seem hard to argue credibly for its success, still less its renewal.

Yet, for the last several years, the Vatican Secretariat of State has been clear that the Vatican-China deal’s renewal is essentially a formality and foregone conclusion, even if its top diplomats have spoken about it in increasingly frank and rueful terms.

Both Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s top diplomat, have been upfront about Pope Francis’ total commitment to the renewal of the Vatican accord with Beijing, apparent violations of its norms notwithstanding. And as the pope’s diplomatic service, the Vatican secretariat is necessarily going to follow the chosen papal policy.

But, even accounting for personal papal enthusiasm for the deal, it seems clear that it won’t be renewed for its own stated aims. Rather, it seems more likely that the renewal of the Vatican-China deal has become a kind of regular point of concession to Beijing by Rome as part of the Vatican’s pursuit of wider goals.

The pressing question would seem to be: are those goals either coherent or achievable?

—

Cardinal Parolin has in recent months been upfront about the long cherished wider strategic Vatican aim to reestablish some permanent Vatican presence on the Chinese mainland. 

Sensitive to the Chinese government’s view that religion is a dangerous, external potential force against Communist Party rule — a view which drives its crackdown on religion both on the mainland and increasingly in Hong Kong — the cardinal has articulated a vision for “no-diplomacy diplomacy,” and an emphasis on making the Church in China more Chinese as a pathway to advancing its missionary work.

While this kind of strategy has been described by some Vatican watchers as cold blooded, it should be noted it has potentially contributed to some low-level progress — like the participation of two mainland bishops in last year’s synodal sessions in Rome. 

Both those bishops were treated on arrival with skepticism in some corners of the Catholic press, being perceived as potential CCP cyphers, but both ended up telegraphing a reasonably overt gesture of independence by overstaying their exit visas from China.

But while Parolin’s “no diplomacy” rhetoric might make for a more palatable approach to Beijing, the reality is China will continue to see the Vatican as, first and foremost, a diplomatic player and the Church as a potentially seditious force.

This being the case, Roman patience with flagrant violations of the Church’s internal sovereignty might be seen as a kind of pragmatic forbearance, rather than just impotent acquiescence. But anything approaching a permanent institutional step forward, like establishing some kind of apostolic delegation on the mainland will likely require an equally permanent diplomatic concession — most likely the severing of ties between the Holy See and Taiwan, something to which Taipei has long been alert.

Taken purely at the level of formal negotiations, neither Rome nor Beijing is likely to be blunt enough in their limited, off-stage discussions to suggest such an explicit exchange of diplomatic goals. 

In Beijing’s case, it’s likely that appearing too eager to disrupt formal ties between the Holy See and Taiwan, to the point of offering a physical bridgehead for the Vatican on the mainland, would be considered a show of weakness relative to Rome. 

For the Vatican, conversely, even the credible suggestion they are willing to deal away their support for Taiwan for some nominal gain on the mainland would make them seem dangerously ruthless in their diplomatic machinations — causing prelates in South East Asia who have been publicly hostile to China, like Burma’s Cardinal Charles Muang Bo and Jakarta’s Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, to consider exactly how much (and who) Rome might be willing to bargain away to make progress with the Beijing.

But if neither side seems likely to achieve their most concrete diplomatic goals with the other, at least in the foreseeable future, what exactly are the current stakes being played for?

—

Last year, Pope Francis announced that he had charged Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi with being his personal peace envoy, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Zuppi has grown the role into a global one — extending beyond the Ukraine crisis to encompass other trouble spots, like the Middle East.

The cardinal has so much latitude in his role as personal papal envoy that he has now made trips to Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, the West Bank, and Beijing. 

Last week, both the Vatican and Chinese government acknowledged that Zuppi had a “cordial” conversation with Beijing’s special representative on Eurasian affairs. The conversation was, according to both sides, a follow on from Zuppi’s previous visit to China last year and focused on peace in Ukraine, while also touching on “other” issues. 

Zuppi’s roving brief has left many in the Vatican’s actual diplomatic department with the sense that he has become a de facto alternative pole of diplomatic power in Rome — conducting negotiations and holding talks without reference to the actual state department.

And given his regular direct contact with Chinese foreign ministry officials, it seems more than likely that Zuppi has evolved into an alternative channel of Vatican-China negotiations. While it is only possible to speculate what if any “other” issues he may have discussed last week with Li Hui, it’s overwhelmingly likely that he would have mentioned again Pope Francis' pressing desire to visit China himself, which the pope repeated last week as well.

Zuppi’s unique role, and the somewhat softer ambition of Francis to visit China, might make for an interesting and viable alternative front for Vatican progress with China, and one in which China’s own ambitions might be more easily accommodated. 

Under president Xi Xinping, China has been clear in its desire to rebalance the global geopolitical order towards a more multipolar world, one in which Beijing is an equal balance to Washington. 

For China, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been something of an opportunity to enhance its own leverage in Western affairs, pitching itself as both a potential ally to and restraint upon Russia. Further afield, China has gone to considerable expense, financial and diplomatic, to enhance its influence via the belt-and-road initiative.

In many of these regions and diplomatic theaters, the Vatican remains an influential voice — and its treatment of China as a necessary reference point in global diplomacy is a real, and relatively easily realized win for Beijing.

The question is whether Zuppi is aware of this, and coordinating it with Cardinal Parolin’s department in a kind of multipronged diplomatic approach to China, or if he is acting without any real regard for more formal diplomatic efforts elsewhere within the Vatican.

If it is the latter, Pope Francis’ own intentions for the cardinal’s work become crucial. 

If the pope is effectively pursuing a deliberate two-track strategy with China, it would be a very high stakes diplomatic gamble, effectively ordering his own state department to lose ground and face in negotiations over the status of the institutional Church in China in the hopes of a soft-power victory in the form of a papal trip to the mainland. 

Leaving aside how achievable that goal is, how much such a trip could yield would depend largely on Francis’ private ambitions for it. 

It’s possible Francis is hoping for a kind of defining diplomatic moment, a kind of Nixonian opening of China to the Church, betting on his personal charisma to win over party apparatchiks to the Secretariat of State’s long-term goals.

Of course, it is equally possible that the pope is hoping for a more evangelically transformative arrival in China, something in the mold of St. John Paul II’s return to Poland in 1979 — often credited as giving birth to the Solidarity movement and the eventual fall of Communism there.

If that is the case, and were he to bring it off, Francis could yet become an era-defining figure in the same way as his predecessor.

But, of course, another option is that Francis is not pursuing any real coherent strategy at all. Instead, he might see China merely as a problem too big to be solved with any single idea or plan. 

Instead, he could be giving his envoys, diplomatic and personal, leave to try every angle of approach, even if there is no particular common thinking behind them — or common sense of what would make for a “win.” In which case, the pope’s stated desire to visit China could represent nothing more than “legacy shopping” and a desire to go where previous popes have not, trusting to the significance of a papal visit to spin itself into some kind of next phase of relations with China.

If that is the case, Francis, Zuppi, and Parolin could find themselves all outmatched at the diplomatic table, separately spending what few chips they have to play until the house takes it all.