Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association - Other State-endorsed Religious Organisations

Other State-endorsed Religious Organisations

CPCA was one of three state-endorsed religious organizations set up in China after 1949. The other two were the Three-Self Patriotic Movement for Protestants, and the Chinese Patriotic Islamic Association. These, however, did not have the complication of any dependence with religious authorities geographically outside mainland China.

The same tactic was also employed by the Communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, generally with less apparent success, though the true feelings of CPCA members are hard to gauge. In the Soviet Union, The Nation Union of Baptists and the government backed Living Church which had broken off from the patriarchal Church in 1922 advocating support for the Soviet government, are two such examples. In many churches by having nominations to ecclesiastical offices under the authority of the State, "patriot priests" were able to enter important posts. The governments tried to ensure constant replacement of less pliable clergy by those loyal to the government and so enable the Communist party to hold sway over Church matters.

The governments of countries in the contemporary era vary in their attitude toward religious influence—particularly that tied to a religious authority outside the country, such as the Vatican—in their societies. For instance, the government of Turkey, has attempted to eschew overly-powerful religious influences in that society, favoring instead secularization. The United States has historically held a principle of non-establishment or the separation between church and state. In many cases, however, the pressure to restrict religious or external influence has come from the society and culture and not directly from the state; several US presidential candidates, and candidates for other office, including John F. Kennedy, later president, and Alfred Smith, faced pressure from citizens who would not support members of the Catholic Church as elected officials, fearing that they would be overly subject to influence from the Vatican and thus potentially act contrary to the will of their own country's populace.

Similar Church divisions for political rather than religious reasons occurred even before the rise of Communism. Examples are:

• the Church of England under the reign of Henry VIII, which soon became formally Protestant (formal schism).
• the Investiture Controversy in the Holy Roman Empire (no formal schism).
• the Gallicanism in the Kingdom of France (no formal schism).
• the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in Revolutionary France, dividing the clergy between jurors and refractory priests (formal schism).