Fatima Perspectives #1292
The photo depicts a bulldozer in the process of demolishing the parish building of the “underground” Catholic Church in Qianyang, China, which housed a church on the second floor and a free medical clinic for the poor on the first. The video of the event is here.
This, writes Sandro Magister, is how “[t]he Chinese regime is… applying its agreement with the Holy See…” That is, its secret agreement with the communist dictators in Beijing, whose pseudo-church, the Patriotic Catholic Association (PCA), the wizards of Vatican diplomacy have now legitimated, thus betraying the fidelity of China’s underground Catholics while signing (in secret) the death warrant for the true Church in China.
The exquisite tragedy of this particular demolition of a Catholic edifice by the butchers of Beijing — the latest in a series of demolitions — is that, as Magister notes, this parish, with its two thousand faithful, is part of the Diocese of Fengxiang, in Shaanxi. Fengxiang is “the only diocese in all of China in which none of the baptized, from the bishop to the last of the faithful, has yet agreed to enroll in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the main instrument with which the regime subjects the Church to itself in the name of its ‘independence’ from Rome that Benedict XVI defined as ‘irreconcilable’ with Catholic doctrine, in the 2007 letter to Chinese Catholics still declared valid by his successor.”
Note that Pope Francis, according to Magister, has indicated that Benedict’s 2007 letter condemning the PCA’s “independence from Rome” as “irreconcilable” with Catholic doctrine is still valid. Yet Francis has approved an accord which facilitates Beijing’s brutal imposition of precisely that “independence.” Francis says one thing but does the opposite. At this point, only the willfully obtuse could be surprised.
Nor should anyone be surprised that it was Francis who had already overseen the demotion of Vincent Guo Xijin, the actual bishop of another diocese, that of Mindong, to the status of a mere auxiliary to Vincent Zhan Silu, “the excommunicated government-appointed bishop, installed by the communist regime in his same diocese.” This required considerable arm-twisting before Guo would “consent” to this obscene arrangement, prior to which, as Magister reports, he had been “blocked from celebrating the Paschal rites,” which he had refused to concelebrate with the impostor Zhan, and was “arrested by the police, to reappear twenty days later.” Into the bargain, Francis has lifted Zhan’s excommunication in the process of subjugating the true Catholic bishop to the schismatic one, whose primary loyalty is to Beijing.
This betrayal wasn’t easy for Francis to pull off. The first time he was asked to step down in favor of Zhan, “Guo resisted, but the second time he said yes. To obtain his obedience, Celli [the Vatican envoy sent to arrange the betrayal] told him that it was Pope Francis himself who was asking him for this ‘sacrifice for the unity of the Chinese Church.’”
How many more examples are needed to demonstrate the immense destructive power of an “obedience” no longer connected to truth and justice in the Church and which in fact operates consistently to undermine the cause of the Gospel? And now Guo, deposed by order of the Pope himself, lives “at the mercy of the regime, which at any moment can arrest him, confine him, block him from celebrating.” Finding themselves in the same situation, to which they have been abandoned by the Pope, are “dozens of ‘clandestine’ priests of his diocese. None of them so far has agreed to sign a document in which it is demanded that they switch to the service of the new bishop Zhan, obey the laws of the state, enroll in the official organizations, support the principle of the Church’s ‘independence.’”
Zhan, meanwhile, has declared publicly that the only way to “the unity of the Chinese Church” is “to do away with the ‘clandestine’ Church” altogether by compelling all the Catholic faithful to join Beijing’s monstrous creation. Francis appears to be on board with this proposal.
Likewise in the Diocese of Xuanhua, the true Catholic bishop, Augustine Cui Tai, was arrested and taken to an unknown location after “one of his priests, named Zhang Li… reported him to the authorities and accused him of not obeying the new norms of the Vatican, which according to him require all the ‘clandestine’ to return to the ‘official’ Church and to submit to its conditions.”
And from the Vatican, not a word to the contrary.
During a recent visit to San Giulio Papa parish in Rome, Francis reportedly “confessed about himself, ‘I’ve had many doubts, many’” about the Faith he is charged to defend and protect, and he advised that young people should be taught to “doubt well” — whatever on earth that might mean. And this from a Pope who constantly derides orthodox Catholics for being hung up on doctrine while lacking a personal relationship with Jesus such as the one he evidently believes he possesses.
What sort of relationship with the divine Founder of the Catholic Church would lead a Pope to lend the authority of his office to the subjugation of faithful Catholics by a communist regime, and the bulldozing of their churches while the Vatican observes a studious silence? The sort of Pope, no doubt, whose calamitous reign must figure prominently in the Third Secret of Fatima.
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