The Sino-Vatican Agreement has been a disaster for the Church in China.
This past Saturday, Pope Francis caved. After many months of delay, he finally accepted the Chinese Communist Party’s candidate for bishop of Shanghai, a bishop by the name of Joseph Shen Bin.
Shanghai, the most important diocese in all of China, was once the See of Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-mei (1901-2000), one of the most heroic bishops in recent history. Cardinal Kung spent three decades in a Communist prison cell (1955-85) for refusing to bend the knee to the atheistic CCP and had been secretly named a cardinal by Pope St. John Paul II in 1979. He was exiled in 1987 and spent his remaining years in the U.S.
Now the Shanghai cathedral is occupied by a man who has a long history of close collaboration with the CCP and its “Catholic” front organizations. Bishop Shen served for many years as the vice president of the schismatic Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and last year was tapped by the CCP to head something called the “College of Chinese Catholic Bishops,” a faux bishop’s conference under the control of its United Front Work Department.
In other words, whatever else his beliefs, Shen is a faithful and trusted servant of the Chinese Communist Party.