(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Wall Street Journal editors published an indictment of Pope Francis in which they said that he undermined the Church’s moral authority by pandering to the Chinese Communist Party.
The case in point was the Vatican’s renewal on Saturday of its secret agreement with the CCP about appointing bishops in the country, according to Breitbart. Since the inception of the agreement in 2018, only six bishops were ordained, despite some 36 vacant episcopal sees.
The Journal’s op-ed stated that the accord had a different focus.
“[The main reason was to] mute Vatican criticism of human rights abuses from the genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs to the political prosecution of Cardinal Joseph Zen in Hong Kong,” the editors said.
WSJ editors then criticized Pope Francis and compared what is happening right now with Catholicism to the days when the Church was also silent about the communists.
“[Pope Francis] who is so critical of the U.S. and capitalism, is silent on China,” the essay stated. “This is a return to the Vatican’s failed Ostpolitik of the 1960s and 1970s when Rome muted criticism of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.”
The comparison is correct. Throughout his nearly eight years of being a pope, Francis has avoided any kind of criticism of Chinese communist leadership, even when the CCP was oppressing Christians by cracking down on their churches, suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and performing genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.
“Regarding the latter, reports suggest that more than a million Uyghurs are held in concentration camps in the autonomous Xinjiang territory, where they have are subjected to genetic testing, hard labor, organ harvesting, torture and forced abortions,” Breitbart reported.
Despite the horrible things that Chinese communists commit against those people, Francis does not even want to mention it.
“Every year at Christmas and again on Easter, the pope reads out a litany of human rights abuses and situations of suffering and injustice from around the globe and it has become almost comical to watch him dance around China as if nothing problematic were happening there,” Breitbart reported.
“In his 2020 Christmas blessing, to take just one example of many, Francis recalled the suffering people of Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, the Yazidis, Israelis and Palestinians, the Lebanese people, Ukraine, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chile, Venezuela, the Philippines and Vietnam.”
The suffering of Chinese people was omitted.
The Journal editors compared Pope John Paul II with Francis, with the comparison being unfavorable to the latter pope.
“In Monday’s essay, the Wall Street Journal editors draw an unfavorable contrast between the courage of Pope John Paul II in calling out the abuses of the Soviet Union and Francis’ pusillanimity before China’s ongoing trampling of human rights and religious freedom,” Breitbart wrote.
“While Pope John Paul began his papacy with the message ‘Be not afraid,’ the essay states, the ‘current Vatican’s motto is: be afraid.’”
“By giving the CCP a free pass on its criminal misbehavior, Pope Francis has’ compromised the moral authority of the Catholic church,’ it declares,” Breitbart continued.
