Bishop pact with China extended over U. S. dissent

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican and China extended a controversial accord on bishop nominations Thursday over strong opposition from the White House and conservative Catholics given Beijing’s crackdown on religious believers.

The Holy See and Beijing government jointly announced a twoyear extension to the 2018 agreement, which expired Thursday.

The Vatican justified the extension by saying the agreement was purely ecclesiastic and pastoral in nature, not political, though it noted that continued dialogue would allow the Holy See to engage with Beijing on other problems, including human rights abuses.

In an unsigned article accompanying the announcement of the extended agreement, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said the Vatican “does not fail to attract the attention of the Chinese government to encourage a more fruitful exercise of religious freedom.”

The agreement, which has never been published, envisages a process of dialogue in selecting bishops. The Vatican signed it in 2018 in hopes it would help unite China’s Catholics, who for seven decades have been split between those belonging to an official, statesanctioned church and an underground church loyal to Rome.

The Vatican has defended the 2018 accord against criticism that Pope Francis sold out the underground faithful, saying the deal was necessary to prevent an even worse schism in the Chinese church after Beijing named bishops without the pope’s consent.

The 2018 accord regularized the status of seven of these “illegitimate” bishops and brought them into full communion with the pope — a key goal of the Vatican in pushing for a deal.

The question of bishop nominations has long vexed VaticanChina relations, with the Holy See insisting on the pope’s divine right to name the successors of the apostles and Beijing considering such nominations foreign infringement on its sovereignty.

The Vatican has been vigorously defending the agreement in recent weeks after U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly criticized it and urged the Holy See not to extend it.

During a tense visit to the Vatican last month, Pompeo made clear U. S. objections to the accord and urged the Vatican to join the U. S. in instead denouncing China’s crackdown on religious and ethnic minorities, Catholics among them.