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Pope Francis, with his silences, has sacrificed Hong Kong on the liberticidal altar of China. But also in Taiwan they are afraid he is abandoning them to Beijing’s growing threats to reclaim the island.
The Holy See has been left as the only one, in Europe and North America, to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, together with Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Haiti, and eight small island states in the Caribbean and Pacific. But on October 21 an anonymous source from the Vatican secretariat of state told “Corriere della Sera” that “China would like us to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan, promising to inaugurate those with us in exchange.” And this precisely in the days when China was intensifying naval and air operations around the island, with such arrogance as to induce American president Joe Biden to pledge, for the second time in a few months, that the United States will be ready to defend Taiwan in case of attack.
It is true that immediately afterwards the same Vatican source said that “we have always replied that first Beijing must allow us to open an apostolic nunciature in the capital” and “only then will we be able to review our relations with the Taipei government.”
But already in July of 2020 an anonymous Vatican source had stated, this time to the “South China Morning Post,” that “Taiwan should not be offended if the [Vatican] embassy in Taipei is moved back to its original address in Beijing.”
Last October 25 the Taiwanese foreign ministry issued a statement to reaffirm that the remarks reported by “Corriere della Sera” do not controvert “the strong friendship and healthy state of Taiwan-Vatican relations,” citing as proof the mutual assistance on the occasion of the coronavirus pandemic, the pope’s greetings for the national holiday of October 10, and above all the “pastoral” and non-political nature of the agreements between the Vatican and Beijing, in the hope that the “faithful in China may truly enjoy the universal values of religious freedom and basic human rights protection.”
Also in the summer of 2020 the Vatican had addressed Taiwan with words of reassurance. In that same month of July, however, the Holy See had held back from signing on to the appeal for Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Organization assembly on the coronavirus, a participation blocked by Chinese veto.
The following year, on July 31 2021, Pope Francis seemed to remedy that failure to endorse the appeal by appointing as a member of the pontifical academy of sciences the Taiwanese Chen Chien-jen, a fervent Catholic, internationally renowned epidemiologist, and former minister of health and then vice-president of the island from 2016 to 2020.
But here too it should be noted that two years before, on October 13 2019, when Chen, at the time vice-president in office, was in Rome to attend canonizations, Francis had the opportunity to greet him and his wife after the ceremony. The photo of the greeting, however – the one reproduced at the head of this article – was quickly removed from all Vatican media, so as not to irritate the Chinese authorities.
At the Vatican, in fact, the rule is that, in deference to China, the political question of Taiwan must be met with sepulchral silence. In the public acts of Pope Francis, before Chen’s appointment, his last vague reference – purely geographical – to the island is in a video message to a conference of the International Christian Maritime Association that was held in October of 2019 in the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung.
While the penultimate mention is in the bulletin of the pontifical audiences of May 14 2018, when Francis received on an “ad limina” visit the seven bishops of the “Chinese Regional Bishops’ Conference,” the official name in Italian and English of the episcopal conference of Taiwan.
In reality, on the website of this episcopal conference its name in Chinese is “Catholic Episcopal Conference of the Region of Taiwan.” But this is only one of the many nomenclature variants the Vatican uses with Taiwan, in order to take note of reality on the one hand and on the other to not irritate Beijing.
The official name of the state of Taiwan is “Republic of China,” while that of mainland China is “People’s Republic of China.” But in the Annuario Pontificio, the “Who’s Who” of the Holy See, the apostolic nunciature in Taipei is under the simple heading “China,” as is the Taiwanese embassy to the Holy See.
Instead, in the same Annuario, the list of Chinese dioceses is under the heading “Mainland China,” while that of the Taiwanese dioceses is under the heading of “Taiwan.” With the caveat that these are in any case purely “geographical” and “practical” titles, without regard for the various states to which the dioceses belong.
The birth of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and China, with the exchange of ambassadors, dates back to 1946. But in 1949 the communist forces of Mao Zedong seized control of the mainland and the previous government ended up confined to the island of Taiwan, ownership of which has always been claimed since then by the Beijing authorities. In 1951 the apostolic nuncio was also expelled from China and fled to Taiwan, relocating the nunciature there too, although beginning in 1971, the year when the the People’s Republic of China replaced the Republic of China at the United Nations, this was run by a simple chargé d’affaires.
Catholics are one percent of Taiwan’s 24 million inhabitants, and like the vast majority of the population are opposed to closer political ties with communist China, let alone reunification.
But this is precisely the fear that weighs on them the most. And the provisional and secret agreement signed between the Vatican and Beijing in September of 2018 on the appointment of bishops in China has increased this concern, expressed one year ago in a statement from the Taiwanese foreign ministry that denounced the harmful effects of that agreement, in terms of the loss of religious freedom and the forced “nationalization” of the Catholic religion.
In addition, the silence of the Holy See on Hong Kong raises fears that for Taiwan as well no help will be coming from Rome, much less from Pope Francis, who has never said a single word in defense of the city’s many Catholic resistance figures, all of whom have ended up in prison, and did not even want to receive the intrepid cardinal Joseph Zen Zekiun, who to no avail flew to Rome in September of 2020 to be heard by the pope.
Hong Kong was also banned from celebrating Taiwan’s national holiday, on October 10, in memory of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising that led to the fall of the Chinese Empire and the following year to the birth of the Republic of China, of which Taiwan is in fact the heir.
While in the meantime the fate of the Catholic Church, in China, does indeed register the recent appointment of a new bishop in Wuhan, one of those subordinate to the regime and imposed by it, but also the incessant harassment of the insubordinate, from the umpteenth arrest of Xinxiang bishop Zhang Weizhu to the umpteenth abduction and forced indoctrination, this time for two weeks, of Wenzhou bishop Shao Zhumin.
In Taiwan freedoms are fully protected, including for the Church. In addition to being a mature democracy, the island is an economic power. It is the world’s leading producer of semiconductors, a key element of the high-tech industry. No surprise that it should want to join the Pacific free trade agreement, abbreviated CPTPP, with the full support of many states that already belong to it, Japan and New Zealand being in the forefront. In fact, it ticks all the boxes for admission, which China does not: from the safeguarding of workers’ rights to respect for the environment, from the protection of intellectual property to the free access of foreign investors.
But there are those who fear that the countdown has already begun. With Xi Jinping’s China ever more impatient to reconquer and subdue the island and with Pope Francis staying silent and passive.
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