English Catholics Urge Vatican to “Tear up” Deal with Communist China

According to LifeSite News, a number of English Catholics, which includes Deacon Nick Donnelly and frequent LifeSite contributor Dr. Joseph Shaw, have signed on to an open letter demanding that the Vatican’s deal with China be “torn up.”

“We the undersigned are writing to express our burning anxiety at the Vatican’s treaty with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the light of the China Tribunal’s findings into forced organ harvesting,” the letter published in the Catholic Herald started off with.

The China Tribunal, a human rights group based in London, informed the U.N. Human Rights Council in September 2019 that China harvests skin, kidneys, lungs, and hearts from members of persecuted religious groups, such as the Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims.

Deacon Donnelly Tweeted the contents of the letter by English Catholics protesting Pope Francis’s deal with the People’s Republic of China, in which they described it as “no coincidence.”

“With burning anxiety was the title of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge protesting the inhumanities of the Nazis regime,” he remarked.

The letter highlights the “[w]idespread accounts of rape and torture” committed in the Chinese government’s state-run program of forced organ-harvesting from prisoners of conscience. In addition, it calls attention to how the government also “harasses and detains leading Catholic clergy and destroys Catholic shrines and churches which refuse to join the official ‘Patriotic Church.’”

“Despite these recent and present human rights abuses, some Vatican representatives have shamed their office and their Christian profession in their responses to concerns about the Holy See’s 22^nd September 2018 provisional agreement with the PRC,” the letter declared.

“In 2018, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, asserted that the Chinese government had ‘accomplished the reform of the organ donation system’ and even went on to claim that ‘those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.’”

The details of The Vatican-China agreement, which was signed in September 2018, has yet to be publicized. However, many Vatican-observers believe it would allow Chinese communist leaders to handpick bishops who will then receive the pope’s approval, which goes against Catholic teachings.

Last August, the Vatican confirmed the consecration of the first Chinese bishop in the aftermath of the controversial deal. On March 6, 2020, Pope Francis urged Chinese Catholics in the Communist country to be “good citizens” and not partake in “proselytism.”

The signatories of this letter declared that it is a “scandal” that Cardinal Zen, the retired bishop of Hong Kong, has not even seen a copy of the agreement.

“The time has come for the Vatican to rescind its treaty with the PRC and by so doing stand in forthright solidarity with all victims of totalitarian oppression,” the letter concluded.