The Suffering Church
Special China Report
On March 22, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)announced that all "religious affairs" in China would henceforth be supervised by a shadowy Party office called the "United Front Department." The former government agency responsible for Catholic and other believers—the State Administration of Religious Affairs bureau (SARA)—has been summarily abolished.
The reorganization attracted little attention outside of China, but it is certain to have unpleasant repercussions for Chinese believers. I believe that this move means that the persecution of Catholics and other believers is about to get much more intense, perhaps rising to levels not seen since the dark days of the 1950s.
The change also means that, in all probability, the draft agreement between the Vatican and Beijing that has been under discussion for years is now a dead letter. In fact, signing it now would mean more than surrendering papal authority over the appointment of bishops to the Chinese state, as bad as that would be. Signing it now would be a betrayal of the faithful into the hands of a new Red Emperor who seems to have a particular animus towards Christians, especially Catholics, and who seems determined to suffocate and extinguish the faith throughout his empire.
It is no secret that religious liberty—despite being guaranteed by the PRC Constitution—has always been severely restricted in the People's Republic of China. But to understand why putting religious affairs into the hands of the CCP's United Front Department bodes so ill for Catholics, you need to understand the purpose of the Department and its work.
The United Front Department was created by Chairman Mao Zedong to co-opt and control non-Communist organizations and individuals -during the Chinese civil war. Its efforts were so successful that Mao called it one of the three "magic weapons" that helped the revolution to succeed. (His other two "magic weapons" were propaganda and, not surprisingly, the Red Army.)
After the civil war, the United Front Department was re-tasked with serving the Party leadership by coercing various groups, such as intellectuals and businessmen, into actively collaborating with the newly established "people's democratic dictatorship." Now that Catholics have been brought under the Department's purview, the same kind of pressure will be exerted on them, and the same kind of active collaboration demanded of the Patriotic Catholic Church with the regime and its goals.
The work of the United Front Department, in other words, will not be limited to merely ensuring that Catholic bishops, priests, and laity comply with the regulations governing religious activity. If that were the only issue, then SARA, which was already enforcing such regulations on Catholics, would not have been abolished. Nor does the move simply mean that the Church will be losing the (already very limited) freedom of action it once had, although this is also absolutely the case.
Rather, putting the United Front Department in charge of religious affairs means that the Party leadership is determined to make the Patriotic Catholic Church into an active "agent of control" for the regime with a single purpose: to subvert and undermine the faith of the millions of Catholics in China, and to prevent them from spreading the faith to others, including their own children. It is nothing less than a hostile takeover—an expropriation if you will—of the Catholic Church in China.
Like Chairman Mao, Xi Jinping hungers for ironclad control over Chinese society and is turning to the United Front Department to accomplish this end. Channeling the late chairman, Xi likewise declared in his October 2017 speech to the National People's Congress that "United Front work is an important magic weapon for the victory of the Party's cause."
Even Chinese officials, who are trying to sell the reorganization as a way of enhancing the "efficiency of government," acknowledge that it is an effort to assert control over believers. "It means management of religious affairs and ethnic issues will be stepped up," says Yang Shu of Lanzhou University. "And we could see the authorities taking a tighter grip than before."
A tighter grip, indeed.
Steven W. Mosher is President of the Population Research Institute (pop.org) and author of Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream Is the New Threat to World Order (Regnery, 2017).
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