If you sup with the devil, you’d better bring a long spoon.” In dealing with China, it’s a piece of folk wisdom the Vatican might want to take more seriously.
Concordats have a long and checkered pedigree in Christian history. Over the centuries in Europe, emperors, kings, and governments often had a role in selecting bishops and in regulating the public life of believers. The Church survived them all. More recent Vatican diplomacy—the Holy See’s 1933 deal with Hitler’s Third Reich and its later Ostpolitik policies in Soviet bloc nations—has been more problematic. In both these cases the Church found herself dealing with a new kind of state creature. She faced not merely national regimes with their parochial ambitions, but systematic ideologies that were, in effect, rival political religions demanding the submission of a citizen’s whole being, body and soul. …
United States Supreme Court Building, July 21, 2020. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work .... Source: Wikimedia Commons
