Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association - CPCA and The Catholic Church

CPCA and The Catholic Church

Despite the difficulties that have confronted China's Catholics over the last 60 years, the Vatican has never declared the Chinese Catholics attending CPCA-sponsored church services to be schismatic, despite calls to do so by organizations outside of China. Chinese Catholics who accept CPCA directives on the government of the Church are not for that reason heretical, though it can perhaps be maintained that they are schismatic. Even if some Chinese Catholics were considered to have accepted as their belief the correctness of the approval of abortion and artificial contraception that has been attributed to the CPCA, their position could be compared with that of certain Catholics in other countries who expressly adopt that approval as their personal belief. In, for instance, inviting bishops appointed under CPCA rules to attend as Catholics in full communion with Rome an assembly of the Synod of Bishops, the Holy See indicated that it does not consider that the Church in mainland China (as distinct from the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association) approves of abortion and artificial contraception. "The Holy See has continued to consider the episcopal ordinations in China fully valid." The clergy whom they ordain therefore conserve valid Holy Orders, and the other sacraments that require a priest as minister (in particular the Eucharist) are also considered valid. As these facts demonstrate, the CPCA and the "underground" Catholic Church in China have significant overlap.

The bishops who conferred episcopal ordination on candidates chosen in the manner laid down by the CPCA, without a mandate from the Holy See, and those who accepted such ordination, participated in a schismatic act and were thereby automatically excommunicated. However, not all of them are considered to be still in schism since, beginning in the early 1980s, nearly all "took advantage of the renewed contacts with missionaries and foreign priests to send letters to Rome in which they declared their full communion with the Pope and the desire to be recognized as legitimate bishops. So ... the bishops subjected to the political control of the Patriotic Association tried the path of canonical sanatio to ... affirm their communion with the Pope, kept hidden because of external conditions, but never renounced in their hearts." Those few Chinese bishops who have not done so remain in formal schism.

For a time, some bishops who refused to accept CPCA control consecrated other bishops, so that there were cases of two parallel hierarchies among Catholics in China, the one in schism partly, the other in full communion with Pope Pius XII and his successors. The first to take this action was the Bishop of Baoding, Joseph Fan Xueyan, who in 1981 consecrated three bishops without any mandate from the Holy See, which, however, gave approval for his action at the end of the same year. This led to at least the perception, perhaps even the reality, of two parallel Roman Catholic Churches in China, often referred to as the "official" Church and the "underground" one.

It was precisely in that period that bishops ordained according to CPCA rules began to request and obtain recognition from the Holy See. On 26 September 1993 the Holy See decided that no more episcopal ordinations of the kind administered by Bishop Fan without previous authorization by the Holy See would be allowed. It was also decided that, given the greater ease of communication then existing, bishops selected by CPCA procedures were likewise to request and receive the prior approval of the Holy See before ordination, and must seek to have as consecrants legitimate bishops, since "the active participation of illegitimate bishops cannot but make more difficult the acceptance of a subsequent request for regularization." They were also to make public, when they deemed it possible and opportune, the assent of the Holy See to their ordination. Some have actually made this public on the occasion of their ordination as bishops.

In September 1992, the CPCA-sponsored Conference of Chinese Catholic Representatives, in which the bishops were a minority, approved new statutes of the Bishops' College, which seemed to subject the College to the Conference and to reiterate the CPCA rules for the election of bishops and the replacement, in the rite of episcopal ordination, of the papal mandate with the consent of the College. Probably because of this, the September 1993 directives also exhorted the bishops to defend with greater courage "the rights of the Church and communion with the Roman Pontiff." And, in fact, the bishops claimed more strongly at the next Assembly of the Catholic Representatives, held in January 1998, leadership in church matters.

The ordinations of Peter Feng Xinmao in 2004 as coadjutor of Hengsui, Joseph Xing Wenzhi as auxiliary of Shanghai on 28 June 2005 and Anthony Dang Ming Yan as coadjutor of Xian on 26 July of the same year were all papal appointments, which were followed by the government-imposed procedures of the appointee's election by representatives of the diocese and consequent approval by the Government itself. The Holy See refrained from making any statement, and no papal document of appointment was read at the ordination rites. However, it was noted that at least Bishop Xing swore to be "faithful to the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church, with Peter as its head."

In a further highly significant gesture, Pope Benedict XVI invited three CPCA-appointed bishops, together along with one "underground" bishop, to the October 2005 assembly of the Synod of Bishops as full members, not as "fraternal delegates", the term used for representatives of non-Catholic churches invited to attend. Government permission for them to travel to Rome was withheld.

The Vatican stated that it had given its prior approval for the episcopal ordination of two CPCA-approved bishops in September 2007, and the Rome-based missionary news service AsiaNews, which follows events in China closely, quoted a Chinese source as saying the government was no longer imposing its own candidates as bishops and was now allowing the church more freedom.