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Business Standard
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
HRW urges new Pope to review 2018 China deal to protect religious freedom
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged newly appointed Pope Leo XIV to review the Vatican's 2018 agreement with the Chinese government, which gives Beijing significant control over the appointment of Catholic bishops. The human rights group also criticised the Chinese government for continuing to install Communist Party-aligned clergy while cracking down on underground churches, clergy, and worshipers. In a statement released on Monday, the HRW said, "The new Pope, Leo XIV, should direct an urgent review of the Vatican's 2018 agreement with the Chinese government that allows Beijing to appoint bishops for government-approved houses of worship. He should also press the government to end the persecution of underground churches, clergy, and worshipers." It added, "The Chinese government has continued to install Chinese Communist Party-compliant clergy. AsiaNews reported that during the mourning period for Pope Francis, who died on April 21, 2025, the Chinese government had moved forward on the appointments of an auxiliary bishop in Shanghai and the bishop of Xinxiang, Henan province." Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch, said the new Pope should push for fresh negotiations with Beijing to protect the religious freedom of Catholics in China. "Pope Leo XIV has an opportunity to make a fresh start with China to protect the religious freedom of China's Catholics. The new Pope should press for negotiations that could help improve the right to religious practice for everyone in China," Maya said. "Chinese Catholics worshiping in underground churches are among the 'ordinary people' on whom Pope Leo has said the church should focus its attention. It's critical for religious freedom in China that the Catholic church stands on their side, and not on the side of their oppressors," Maya added. The HRW statement further said that Pope Leo should press the Chinese government to immediately free several Catholic clergy, including James Su Zhimin, Augustine Cui Tai, Julius Jia Zhiguo, Joseph Zhang Weizhu, Peter Shao Zhumin, and Thaddeus Ma Daqin, who in recent years have been imprisoned, forcibly disappeared, or subjected to house arrest and other harassment. The Chinese government has long restricted the country's estimated 12 million Catholics to worship in official churches under the leadership of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, and has persecuted Catholics who have attended underground "house churches" or pledged allegiance only to the pope. The government has conducted frequent raids on underground churches and arrested unapproved clergy and congregants. The 2018 Provisional Agreement regarding the Appointment of Bishops, the full text of which has never been made public, ended a decades-long standoff over who had the authority to appoint bishops in China. Under the agreement, Beijing proposes future bishops, and the pope has veto power over those appointments. Since the 2018 agreement, the two parties have agreed on the appointment of 10 bishops, covering about a third of the over 90 dioceses in China that remained without a bishop. The Vatican has never exercised its veto power, however, even when the Chinese government violated the agreement by unilaterally appointing bishops in 2022 and 2023, appointments that Pope Francis later accepted, according to HRW. The Chinese government, which restricts all religious practice in China to five officially recognized religions, regulates official church business and retains control over personnel appointments, publications, finances, and seminary applications. The 2018 Holy See-China agreement was reached during President Xi Jinping's drive to tighten already stringent controls over religions in China in the name of "Sinicization" of religion. In recent years, the authorities have demolished hundreds of church buildings or the crosses atop them, prevented adherents from gathering in unofficial churches, restricted access to the Bible, confiscated religious materials not authorised by the government, and banned Bible and religious apps. The HRW further reported that the Chinese government's Sinicization of religion has meant ruthless repression of Buddhism in Tibet, where the Chinese authorities have imposed strict controls over the process of selecting Tibetan lamas, including by forcibly disappearing the six-year-old Panchen Lama since 1995, and by controlling the process for the selection of the future Dalai Lama. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Euronews
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
How local groups of bishops could revolutionise the conclave
One of the late Pope Francis' central goals was to try and bring together the different strains of Catholicism. To do this, he used a particular device of ecclesiastical and institutional action: the synod, a council of bishops institutionalised in 1965 by the modernising Second Vatican Council to moderate and modernise the absolute power of the popes and the Roman curia in matters of faith. Synods are not popular assemblies, but councils of the bishops of a country or a fairly large geographical area. Their members already occupy prominent positions in the church hierarchy. "Pope Francis' objective was to enhance the synodal element, but not as a new power structure," says Francesco Clementi, professor of Comparative Public Law at Sapienza University, Rome. "The pope is always the pope. And as Pope Francis said, he remains a central figure in the vertical of ecclesiastical and spiritual power. The assemblies of bishops would simply have facilitated decisions (in Rome) by widening the audience in the hierarchies." The proposals made by synods during Pope Francis' pontificate have been crucial for the future of the church and the faithful, such as the celibacy dispensations for Catholic priests or the potential priestly role of women in the church. The late pontiff's unprecedented use of the synod thus represents a decisive innovation that could change the course of both the conclave and the future pontificate. Synods are consultative institutions whose decisions are not binding on the pontiff, but in the age of mass media, they oblige him to be more sensitive to the needs of external and remote realities, even without bringing the Vatican's centrality into question. The decisions synods produce, even if not formally adopted, may therefore influence the conclave, which this year is composed of newly appointed cardinals who in many cases come from the church's peripheries. Moreover, papal elections often throw up surprises, as Father Gianni Criveller, director of the digital periodical Asia News, a sinologist and longtime missionary in China, explains. "The unexpected happens in conclaves: they (the cardinals) start voting and then unexpected candidates emerge who do not necessarily correspond to the initial objectives," he tells Euronews. "However,* it will be difficult for someone to be elected who goes beyond what Pope Francis has already done. There would be two or three such candidates among the cardinals, but I don't see how they can gather consensus until the end of the conclave." The innovative use of synods both under Pope Francis and also in the short period after his death before the papacy is filled may prove to have changed the spiritual and political agenda of the cardinal electors by introducing elements and views that are relatively heterodox, if not directly opposed to previous convictions. However, synods do not necessarily advance progressive ideas. Their orientation depends on the geographical area and culture from which they are drawn. The blessing of people in same-sex relationships was one of Pope Francis' major decisions, and it still causes great divisions in the church. "The entire African Church, including the bishops and cardinals, were strongly opposed to this initiative," recalls Father Criveller. "They have clearly said that in Africa, they will never apply the letter on the blessing of homosexuals inspired and approved by Pope Francis." Pope Francis himself was a man capable of great leaps both forward and backward, such as on the women's issue. He was the first pope to appoint seven women to the top administrative posts in the Vatican, among them prefect, director of the Vatican museums and secretary general of the governorate, a position usually occupied by a bishop. However, he did not open up the priesthood to women, a move demanded by Catholic groups from Germany to the Amazon. On this front, the Catholic Church has fallen behind Protestant and Anglican churches that have welcomed women into the clergy. Among the cardinals taking a stance against women in the priesthood is Bishop of Stockholm Anders Arborelius, an ex-Lutheran convert to Catholicism who was appointed Cardinal of the Nordic countries by Pope Francis in 2017. He is opposed to the priesthood of women even though in Sweden's majority Protestant denomination, there are now more female priests than male ones. Despite the expanded role of the synods, some proposals of the bishops' assemblies from other parts of the world were rejected by Pope Francis, among them, the notion of allowing the appointment of married priests. "The Amazon synod had called for the admission to the priesthood of married men," says Father Criveller. "Not priests who can marry, but married men who want to become priests. Yet Pope Francis rejected the proposal." Pope Benedict XVI himself had gone further on this issue, opening the doors of Roman Catholicism to Anglican priests who were at odds with their original denomination. Moreover, dispensations have existed for centuries within the Catholic Church for married priests, among them Ukrainian Greek Catholics, Chaldeans, Maronites, Copts and other Eastern Catholics. For many sectors of the Catholic Church, therefore, synods are not a problem because of some inherent progressivism. Instead, their disruptive role could come from the diversity of their orientations and decisions. Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen said that the electors of the future pope must be aware that he will have the responsibility to either allow the synod process to continue or decisively cut it short. "It is a matter of the life or death of the Church founded by Jesus," he said, concluding that if synods are disconnected from tradition and the heritage of faith, they might turn into an instrument of disunity instead of communion. Zen is known for his harsh criticism of the agreement reached by the Vatican in 2018 with the Chinese communist government for the appointment of bishops in mainland China. The architect of the agreement with Beijing was one of the current papal appointees, the outgoing secretary of state Pietro Parolin, who would also be disliked by the US for his role in the deal.
Euronews
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
How China will influence the next pontiff after Pope Francis' pivot to Asia
ADVERTISEMENT The body of Pope Francis will be buried this Saturday in the Roman Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. At that point, his mortal remains will rest under the protection of an image of Mary with a high spiritual value for Catholicism, great symbolic power for the Jesuits — and for relations between the Catholic Church and Asia. This is the Byzantine icon of the Virgin Salus Populi Romani, the saviour of the Roman people. It was the first representation of Mary officially authorised, by papal bull, to be disseminated and reproduced. The icon of the Virgin of the Basilica of St Mary Major is also a symbol of Catholic attempts to evangelise Asia. In fact, it became the emblem of the epic of the great Jesuit journeys to the Far East, including China, and in 1602, Jesuit missionary and sinologist Matteo Ricci donated a copy of the icon to the Chinese Emperor. The search for a new "passage to the East" for evangelisation has been one of the great axes of Pope Francis' pontificate. Many observers even consider it the late pope's core political mission. A decentralised conclave The eastward turn is manifest at this year's conclave, where Asia will be better represented among the voting cardinals than ever. Some ecclesiastical observers have gone so far as to call the redistribution of voting power "revolutionary". Theologian Gianni Criveller, a missionary for decades in the Chinese world and editor of the digital newspaper Asia News, said this spells the end of a Eurocentric custom that assigned an overwhelming majority to cardinals from the Old Continent. "Surprisingly enough, cities like Paris, Milan, and countries like Austria and Ireland will not have a cardinal in the conclave," he explained. "Instead, we will have cardinals from Mongolia, where there are only about a thousand Catholics, from Myanmar, and another from Thailand, countries with a large Buddhist majority." For the first time, Asia will be represented by 23 cardinal electors out of 135. China will have one, Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-Yan of Hong Kong. The proportion of Asian electors is large compared to the spread of Catholicism in that region. The only deeply Catholic country in the region is the Philippines, whose religiosity was inherited from its Spanish colonisers. Fedeli cattolici siedono davanti a un'icona della Vergine Maria nella Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, martedì 25 febbraio 2025. (Foto AP/Bernat Armangue) Bernat Armangue/Copyright 2025 The AP. All rights reserved Of the almost 1.5 billion Catholics worldwide, Asia accounts for 10%, although they comprise little more than 3% of the continent's population. Nevertheless, Asia is now at the forefront of human and economic development, and the Vatican cannot pretend it does not exist. According to Pope Francis' papal diplomacy, a Catholic presence in those no longer remote areas will soon be as essential as its traditional rootedness in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Another reason Asia was relevant in the late pope's time is technology. Pope Francis was the first pontiff to address a summit of G7 economy ministers, appearing in Apulia in June 2024 to talk about artificial intelligence. The Gospel, a passport to the world Father Criveller said the ultimate aim of the geographical revolution of the College of Cardinal electors was "the spread of the Gospel". "It is not proselytism, but simply the transmission of Gospel knowledge to other cultures, exactly as the Jesuits did in the 17th century." ADVERTISEMENT The idea was for a pastoral mission to move the Catholic Church away from the West's colonial history; to bring the world to Rome, and not vice versa. That vision was certainly informed by Pope Francis' South American background. But the evangelical mission is not everything. According to Professor Silvia Menegazzi, founder of the Centre for Contemporary China Studies, "Pope Francis had a very precise vision of relations between states. A vision that has certainly always been much more in line with that of countries that we might call non-Western, that we might call the Global South." Il cardinale Luis Antonio Tagle, a sinistra, e il cardinale Ricardo Vidal, delle Filippine, arrivano per un incontro in Vaticano, mercoledì 6 marzo 2013. Alessandra Tarantino/AP The Argentinian Pontiff made pastoral trips to the Middle East, South Korea, the Philippines, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Thailand, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Indonesia, East Timor and Singapore. Yet despite political efforts, he failed to visit the two Asian giants: India and China. ADVERTISEMENT As things stand, the Vatican and Beijing have no formal diplomatic relationship. In fact, the Holy See recognises Taiwan as the Republic of China, one of the key reasons that Pope Francis failed to grace mainland China with a visit. Beijing, however, has expressed condolences for Francis' death, and is considering whether to send a "high-ranking government delegation" to his funeral. Rapprochement with Beijing Nevertheless, papal diplomacy achieved a major political breakthrough with Beijing in 2018, establishing the possibility of approving the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops by the communist regime. Until then, the Chinese authorities unilaterally appointed local bishops, but as of 2018, the Vatican now approves the appointments, a change that could greatly boost the Catholic Church's credibility in China and East Asia more widely. ADVERTISEMENT But there have necessarily been tradeoffs. "This agreement is certainly an exercise in Vatican realpolitik," says Father Criveller. "As a quid pro quo, the pope has not been able to visit Catholics in Hong Kong, Macao and especially Taiwan. Nor has he ever intervened in detail on the issues of human and religious rights in China and the issue of Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists, or the military threats against Taiwan." According to official figures provided by the government in Beijing, there are about 10 million Catholics in China, but church sources say that that number includes only the faithful who belong to official religious institutions. There are also unofficial Catholic organisations in China that the authorities do not recognise, comprising as many as 30 bishops out of every hundred, who are accepted by the Vatican as legitimate. ADVERTISEMENT "Compared to predecessors, with Francis, relations between China and the Vatican have improved," said Menegazzi, "but not as the Vatican expected. China remains by ancient tradition — not just by virtue of communism — the most atheistic country in the world." "We will see how the successor will set his Asian policy. Certainly the relationship with China was tied more to the person of Francis. So it will be necessary to evaluate how the new pontiff will look at China, rather than vice versa." Related Mural in Rome questions funeral guests for Pope Francis Trump and Zelenskyy to sit apart at pope's funeral as organisers opt for French alphabetical order Although the composition of the post-Francis conclave is partly linked to the late pope's political and religious orientations, it is unclear how far the political conditions of the world and Europe will allow his successor to complete Pope Francis' outreach to the east. "Certainly the late pontiff attached great importance to politics and international relations," said Father Criveller. "In contemporary times, the only pope we've had like him was John Paul II." ADVERTISEMENT
Herald Malaysia
25-04-2025
- General
- Herald Malaysia
Global Happiness Index 2025: Japan and South Korea struggle, India thrives
Only 13 per cent of Japanese are satisfied with their quality of life, and just 15 per cent believe they can improve it. In stark contrast, 74 per cent of Indians report being content with their lives, and 88 per cent say they are 'very' or 'fairly' happy. Apr 25, 2025 A total of 74 per cent Indians say they're content with their lives right now. (Photo: Pexels) TOKYO: Only 13 per cent of Japanese are satisfied with their quality of life, and just 15 per cent believe they can improve it. In stark contrast, 74 per cent of Indians report being content with their lives, and 88 per cent say they are 'very' or 'fairly' findings come from the 2025 edition of the Global Happiness Index, published by the French research firm Ipsos. The survey, conducted between December 2024 and January 2025, gathered responses from nearly 24,000 adults under the age of 75 across 30 data highlights a growing divide between developing Asian nations and more industrialised countries. Since 2011, South Korea has seen a 21-point drop in happiness, with only 50 per cent of its citizens now reporting they are happy and just 24 per cent saying they enjoy a good quality of Japan, about 60 per cent say they are 'fairly' or 'very' happy — down 10 points from 14 years ago. Major sources of dissatisfaction include mental health struggles, economic pressures, and social contrast, Southeast Asian nations show significantly higher happiness levels: 79 per cent of Indonesians report being happy, followed by 78 per cent in Thailand, 76 per cent in Malaysia, and 73 per cent in about the future also differs greatly across Asia. In India, 79 per cent expect their quality of life to improve. Similar optimism is seen in Indonesia (76 per cent), Thailand (70 per cent), Malaysia (59 per cent), and Singapore (46 per cent). Meanwhile, South Korea and Japan sit at the bottom, with only 38 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively, expressing hope for mental well-being is a growing factor in happiness in the West, in Asia, emotional and relational factors — such as family, love, and a sense of control over life — play a more central role. In India, for instance, strong family ties and feeling loved are key contributors to economic hardship remains the leading cause of unhappiness in all 30 countries. Though wealth alone doesn't guarantee happiness, lack of financial security clearly fuels dissatisfaction. Across most surveyed nations, feeling loved, having children, and finding purpose in life are consistent drivers of happiness. The survey also notes that older people tend to be happier than younger generations — a pattern especially pronounced in economically developed nations. --Asia News
