China pressures underground Catholics to join state church, rights group says

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasing its pressure campaign on underground Catholics, according to a report from Human Rights Watch.

“A decade into Xi Jinping’s Sinicization campaign and nearly eight years since the 2018 Holy See-China agreement, Catholics in China face escalating repression that violates their religious freedoms,” Yalkun Uluyol, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in an April 15 report. “Pope Leo XIV should urgently review the agreement and press Beijing to end the persecution and intimidation of underground churches, clergy, and worshippers.”

Human Rights Watch said it conducted interviews with “nine people outside the country who had firsthand knowledge of Catholicism in China” for its report, who said the 2018 Vatican-China agreement has “provided an overarching structure for the authorities to pressure underground Catholics.”

Witnesses in the report said Catholics in China felt the agreement left them with “no other choice but to join the official church” and that those who have remained in the underground Church “felt betrayed by the Vatican.”

Human Rights Watch also highlighted the Chinese government’s persecution of Catholic bishops and clergy, citing instances of detention and forced disappearance as well as China’s move to ban Catholic priests from teaching or evangelizing online.

“Catholic clergy released from detention continue to face harassment,” the report said. “One person said in January that a priest he knew was barred from having bank accounts, SIM cards, and a passport, and thus has ‘no means of survival and can barely make ends meet for even a day or two.’”

“The Vatican’s agreement and policy regarding the Catholic Church in China in recent years has been disastrous,” Nina Shea, Hudson Institute senior fellow,  told EWTN News. “Faithful Catholic bishops are subjected by the government to being disappeared, detained indefinitely without due process, sidelined but ‘recognized’ or being actively threatened with detention if they resist swearing fealty to only the Chinese Communist Party and not Rome.”

Shea, who also serves as director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, urged Pope Leo XIV to lead a global prayer vigil for Chinese bishops who have been forcibly disappeared or detained.

“Pope Benedict XVI designated May 24 as the World Day of Prayer for the Church in China but it’s been virtually forgotten in the last few years and never robustly embraced by the Vatican, which probably sees it as implicit criticism of the CCP, something it is loath to do,” she said.