Thread: The Vatican Abandons 12 Million Chinese Catholics As It Announces ‘ Deal’ W/China

The Vatican Abandons 12 Million Chinese Catholics As It Announces ‘Historic Deal’ With Communist Government

The preliminary agreement with China "has been agreed following a long process of careful negotiation and foresees the possibility of periodic reviews of its application," the Vatican said in a statement issued as Pope Francis began a visit to the Baltic states. "It concerns the nomination of Bishops, a question of great importance for the life of the Church, and creates the conditions for greater collaboration at the bilateral level," it said. Analysts warn that Beijing could use the accord to further crackdown on Catholic faithful in China.



by Geoffrey Grider September 22, 2018


China’s Communist “Party will frame the deal as the Vatican’s seal of approval to the state-run Catholic Church, at a time when Christian believers are facing a severe crackdown on their beliefs and practises.

A few weeks ago we brought you the story of how China has begun a campaign of persecution of the estimated 67 million Chinese christians in its country. The vast majority of these professing Christians are Protestants and Bible believers, with roughly 12 million being Catholics.
Today the Vatican made the announcement that they have “worked out a deal” for the Chinese government to control how Catholic bishops are chosen, thus ensuring that the government is able to monitor and control everything that is said and done within the worship service, the bible studies, all of it. Why would the Vatican and Pope Francis do this? The following verses should clear that up for you right away.
“And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.” Revelation 17:5,6 (KJV)
FROM THE AFP: The Vatican on Saturday announced an historic accord with China on the appointment of bishops in the Communist country in what could pave the way for the normalisation of ties between the Catholic Church and the world’s most populous country.
The preliminary agreement with China “has been agreed following a long process of careful negotiation and foresees the possibility of periodic reviews of its application,” the Vatican said in a statement issued as Pope Francis began a visit to the Baltic states.
“It concerns the nomination of Bishops, a question of great importance for the life of the Church, and creates the conditions for greater collaboration at the bilateral level,” it said. Analysts warn that Beijing could use the accord to further crackdown on Catholic faithful in China.
According to the expert, China’s Communist “Party will frame the deal as the Vatican’s seal of approval to the state-run Catholic Church, at a time when Christian believers are facing a severe crackdown on their beliefs and practises. Ultimately, the Party would like to subsume all forms of worship under state organs that make it easier to manage and ensure that everyone’s primary loyalty is to the state,” Sullivan told AFP. READ MORE
Now, when you read even deeper into the reasons for this “historic deal” between the Catholic Church and China, you quickly find out that the real purpose of the deal is a political one. It has very little to do with the Catholic Church, which is why Pope Francis can abandon his Chinese followers so easily. People forget that Vatican City is a country over which the Pope of the Catholic Church also presides as its king.
The announcement today went on to say that “China said the ‘provisional’ agreement was signed in Beijing by vice foreign minister Wang Chao and a Vatican delegation headed by the under secretary for relations with state, Antoine Camilleri and added that the two sides “will continue to maintain communication and push forward the improvement of bilateral relations.” The Vatican is one of only 17 countries around the world that recognizes Taipei instead of Beijing but Pope Francis has sought to improve ties with China since he took office in 2013.”
A lot of people get confused with Revelation 17 because it shows you a ‘harlot’ who is also a ‘mystery’. It shows you what appears to be a religious organization that is also a political kingdom, and it shows you a ‘pope’ who is also a ‘king’. To many people it is very hard to reconcile the two, yet, is this not exactly what the Vatican-Catholic system truly is? It’s not one or the other, it’s both!
You just read for yourself in the announcement from the Vatican today that looked like it started out talking about the church and its bishops, but very quickly showed you Vatican secretaries of state negotiating a ‘bilateral agreement’ with the Chinese government. That’s not what churches do, that’s what nations and political leaders do. Francis used his authority over the Catholic Church to sell out his followers so that he could make a deal as the ruler of Vatican City with the nation of China.
“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” Revelation 18:4 (KJV)
Pray for China’s 67 million Christians, and especially for the 12 million Chinese Catholics who were just handed over to the control of the Chinese state-run religious complex. Pray that their eyes will be opened to this phony pope and that they will come out of that corrupt religious system and into the glorious light of the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/the-v...st-government/

Pope Francis betrays China's Christians

September 23, 2018

What the heck has gotten into Pope Francis? When he's not letting a leftist pervert like Cardinal McCarrick pick out the archbishops, he's letting the communists of Beijing.

By Monica Showalter

What the heck has gotten into Pope Francis? When he's not letting a leftist pervert like Cardinal Theodore McCarrick pick out the archbishops, he's letting the communists of Beijing.
According to Deutsche Welle:

Pope Francis on Saturday endorsed the legitimacy of seven Chinese bishops, appointed by Beijing without the Vatican's approval.
The decision is part of a historic accord between the Catholic Church and China over the nomination of bishops, which is normally a papal prerogative. The issue has strained ties between the two for decades.

His betrayal of the Catholic Church in China is simply mind-blowing.
In a bid to establish diplomatic relations with China, he agreed to allow the Chinese state, run by atheistic communists, to choose the archbishops to lead the Catholic Church over there in a move that undercuts the underground Catholic Church over there, which has rejected this phony leadership for their faith.
It might not have been a complete capitulation -- he reportedly may have reserved the right to veto any of the Beijing-picked candidates, so I suppose we won't be getting an obvious comrade in a Mao suit spouting slogans. But we will probably get quite a few less obvious ones, Chinese internal intelligence agency informants, and people who subtly undermine the Church teachings itself because of their alignment to the regime.
It's an astonishing betrayal of the millions of Catholics inside China who have carefully carried the torch as the Christian martyrs of ancient Rome once did, underground, risking their lives. They threw such people into the lion's dens back then. Today, they throw them into the lao gai, or Chinese gulags. Yet they are all saints.
And they play an important role to Catholics in free countries. Essentially: If they can walk 20 miles to mass, and hide out from the secret police to bring the sacraments, who am I to miss mass or not perform some act of charity? This is what Catholics think when they consider the underground Church in China.
So to see them abandoned like this, after all their sacrifices to live the faith, only to see Pope Francis allow their enemy to appoint their leaders and lead their church, is horrifying. Can you imagine what they must be saying to each other?
Could there be any greater means of shrinking the Church after an act like that? As Pope John Paul has noted, the Church's fruits in Asia have always been rather meager given the strength of the other faiths. China of course is different, given its communist embrace of enforced atheism, making it rather ripe for converts. Yet the Chinese Church got it all thrown in their faces. It rather resembles Pope Francis's acts in Cuba, where he made common cause with the Castroites, to establish diplomatic relations, and presumably to get some Church schools and masses going, yet also unleashed a huge wave of repression on Cuba's dissidents, particularly the Ladies in White, who have been beaten by Cuba's goons as they walked to mass and went into the churches.
The, uh, 'social justice' teachings of the Church don't seem to apply in these cases, because the Church leadership has been dead silent.
And that is what this comes down to: leadership. Who picks the bishops picks the Church leadership. Putting Beijing's men in pretty well puts some in line to become cardinals, which in turn puts them in line to voting for the next pope. The implications of that are staggering.
What's more, it's part of a pattern. The pope has been roundly criticized for abandoning the Uniate Catholics of Ukraine in the interest of good relations with Moscow, and the persecuted Christians of the Middle East in the interest of good relations with the European ruling class, which favors Muslim immigration to Europe. Tha abandonment of China's Christians, who have carried the torch in silence for so long is extremely hard to stomach. There have been many complaints from Venezuela, too, about the Pope's failure to condemn the socialist starvation policies of Nicolas Maduro, in the interest of good relations with the Chavista government. In all cases, the pope has chosen the state over the people.
Quite an irony from the man who up until now has been called 'the people's pope.'

Image credit: Yoshi Canopus, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0

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Liberal Pope Francis has lost the most important liberal weekly in Europe

September 23, 2018

You might think that the enthusiastic support Pope Francis has offered for environmentalism, open borders, and the normalization of homosexual behavior would buy him support from liberal media.


By Thomas Lifson
You might think that the enthusiastic support Pope Francis has offered for environmentalism, open borders, and the normalization of homosexual behavior would buy him support from liberal media. But Der Spiegel, the most important weekly magazine in Europe, has turned against the Roman Catholic Prelate with a cover story that proclaims (auf Deutsch) the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not lie,” with a subhead: “The Pope and the Catholic Church in their greatest crisis.”

Der Spiegel’s online English-language website has not yet published a translation of its new cover story, but via the website Rorate Caeli, we get a partial translation from the Catholic Herald:

The report most notably includes an interview with an abuse survivor from Argentina who says she was one of a group of victims who wrote to Francis shortly after his election, but never received a reply.
The woman, Julieta Añazco, says she was sexually abused by a priest when she was seven years old. She said that in 2013, shortly after Pope Francis was elected, she and 13 other victims wrote to him to describing what had happened.
They sent the letter by recorded delivery and, three weeks later, received a confirmation of receipt. However, they never received a reply.
The accused priest was subsequently transferred to a nursing home where he “continues to celebrate Mass”.
“During Bergoglio’s time as cardinal, many of the abuse victims in Buenos Aires had turned to him for help; nobody was permitted access to him,” the magazine says, adding that there are currently 62 trials in process against Argentine priests. “The number of their victims could be in the thousands.”
A legal defender for Argentine abuse survivors, Juan Pablo Gallego, says that Pope Francis is “now in exile in Rome – has found his refuge there, so to speak”. Gallego adds that in Argentina Francis faces “the suspicion that he protected for years rapists and abusers of children.”
He cites the example of Fr Julio César Grassi, who is now in prison for raping teenage boys. Francis had been Grassi’s confessor and ordered a legal report to defend Grassi against the charges.
Gallego says that in 2006 he had a conversation with the then Cardinal Bergoglio. “He was withdrawn and mistrusting, he said no word about the fact that the Church paid Grassi’s lawyers. The current image of an open, sympathetic Pope Francis does not fit the man whom I sat in front of at the time.”

Hat tip: Mark Wauck:
Monica Showalter adds:
Thomas is right. The loss of the big German establishment magazine does signal a sea change.
One, the charges themselves are of the same kind that Cardinal Carlo Maria Vigano laid out - coverup - yet are coming from a very different source on another continent. Vigano was an insider, he knew what the diplomatic correspondence said, he knew who was under sanction and who was in and out. These charges from Buenos Aires are from ordinary lay people, people who are not insiders, but people who who were trying to send information. It signals a pattern. Pope Francis's Vatican apologists likely can't call these types of charges political.
Here is another element worth looking at. In Chile, next door to Argentina, Pope Francis found himself in a lot of hot water after he first dismissed allegations of coverups against Chile's cardinals as the work of liars, and then was met with an outcry. He backtracked, apologized, and had the whole Chilean clerical leadership resign. It sounds very similar to how he ran things in Argentina, because his response was the same. But he'd have a harder time still dismissing the entire Argentine leadership for the same thing, given that he likely had a role in appointing them.
Here is the second element suggesting a sea change: German money pretty much finances the Catholic Church in Latin America. That's the word of a Vatican linked source I have. It explains why the Church is so incredibly leftwing in that area, and socialist liberation theology runs rampant. It's basically eurotrash-thinking grafted onto a New World virgin culture, as some such as Alvaro Vargas Llosa have observed in other contexts, the Germans stamping their romantic worldview onto parts afar, there's nothing inherently leftwing about Latin America except for that German money influence artificially inflating it. With the German influence strong in the Latin American church, what does it say that Der Spiegel is pointing the finger now?
Update: More on the still-untranslated Speigel article via Lifesite News:

According to the magazine, one cardinal not only called the Pope effectively a liar, but he also said: “From the beginning, I did not believe one word of his.” The Spiegel's own comments on this papacy, as we shall see, are no less strong.
One of the high-ranking interlocutors told the journalistic team that, in the Vatican there reigns “a climate of fear and of uncertainty.” “Francis is very good at getting things in motion,” a German prelate is quoted as saying, “but when, in the end, there is only wavering, that for sure does not help.” Examples of such waverings are to be found, as the Spiegel says, in Pope Francis' handling of the debate about Communion for Protestant spouses of Catholics. One German cardinal tells the magazine about lies, intrigues, “and a Holy Father who, unlike anyone before him, puts into doubt the truth of the Faith.”
Marie Collins, herself a prominent abuse victim and advocate for victims, speaks about the Pope's and the Vatican's handling of abuse cases thus: “beautiful words in the public and [then] opposite actions behind closed doors.”
The Spiegel comments that the Pope might very well ignore the “indications of crimes within his own inner circle” because “he is interested, for reasons of power politics, in keeping one or another cardinal or bishop in his office.” So, in the German magazine's eyes, “Francis [thereby] makes himself vulnerable.” He fights for years “against global capitalism, but took – like his predecessors – sums of millions from the now-rejected Cardinal McCarrick which he himself had received from donors.” Additionally, “the Pope praises the value of the traditional family, but then surrounds himself with counselors and collaborators who live the opposite – in a more or less obvious concubinage with representatives of either sex.”
“Is the Pope still master of the situation?” asks the Spiegel. It points out that “criticism [of this papacy] meanwhile comes from a circle much larger than that of globally connected arch-conservatives.” One of the problems of this Pope, according to the magazine, is that “he is silent in delicate matters” such as the dubia of the four cardinals concerning his post-apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, but also concerning the petition of 30,000 women who have recently requested that he answer the questions arising from the Viganò report. He does not answer these women, he is mute, and “he, rather, leaves the accusation unchallenged that he has known, since June 2013, about the doings of the child-abuser McCarrick.”

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