Did Pope Francis Just Make China Protestant?

The long-term consequences of the new provisional agreement

By George Weigel September 24, 2018

Attempts to defend the recent provisional agreement between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China, which was signed on September 22, have rung increasingly hollow over the past few days.

That pattern began before the ink was dry in Beijing, as Pope Francis’s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, issued a statement claiming that now “for the first time all the bishops in China are in communion with the Bishop of Rome, with the Successor of Peter.”

Really?

Weren’t “all the bishops in China” in full communion with the pope before the Chinese Communists set up their front church, the Patriotic Catholic Association?

Parolin also tried to justify the provisional agreement on the grounds that Pope Francis, like his immediate predecessors, “looks with particular care to the Chinese people” — a claim that, translated from Vaticanese, suggests that John Paul II and Benedict XVI would have made the same deal Francis and Parolin reportedly did.

But that deal was available to John Paul II and Benedict XVI and they didn’t make it, because they knew that giving first rights of nomination over Chinese bishops to the Chinese state or the Chinese Communist Party was both a violation of the Church’s own canon law and a prescription for a puppet episcopate............To Read More.....

My Take - Is it any wonder so many Catholics stopped donating to the Church and so many keep asking - who picked this guy? But to me the most important sentence in this article is their justification for this agreement saying:

"Throughout the negotiating process, those diplomats and the mouthpieces of the current pontificate kept insisting that the Holy See had to have a place at the table in Beijing, for China was the rising global hegemon."

Why is that so important to me?  Because I hear this same justification by the leadership of our industry involving the EPA and the green movement.  "We need a seat at the table." What we have to understand that by having "a seat at the table" with those who hate and despise who we are, and what we do, isn't going to ameliorate their actions, or long range goals.  It justifies them!  

Then we become party to our own demise. Why is that so hard to grasp? Why do so many refuse to grasp that fundamental truth? 

Because to embrace that means being an outright adversary to the forces of evil, and most don’t have the courage to be that kind of rock in the current.  Heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart.

We can always find the go along, get along, Neville Chamberlains or the Vidkun Quislings of the world as leaders. Appeasers and traitors are legion!

But where can we find a Winston Churchill? Where do we find leaders that run to the fight and not away from it?  Where do organizations find leaders that are capable, and willing to stand against the slings and arrows of adversity? 

You can't find them, they have to come to you, because unlike so many "leaders" they recognize what is the battle of their time, and they're willing to fight it, and because after the go along to get along guys make a mess of everything - there's no one else to turn to but the Winston Churchill's of the world.