Papal bull: the shame of the Vatican’s dealings with China

This week Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, went on trial in Kowloon Magistrates Court as a punishment for supporting pro-democracy demonstrators during the mass protests in Hong Kong. He was arrested in May and, along with four other trustees of a humanitarian relief fund, charged with failing to register the organisation properly.

The chances that he will be acquitted are slim, to put it mildly. This is Beijing’s way of confirming that Hong Kong is now a police state. Even a frail and saintly cleric who walks with the aid of a stick is not safe to endorse democracy. No one is.

When Zen was arrested, Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that it coincided with the appointment of the former policeman John Lee as chief executive of its ‘puppet regime’. ‘Lee is not just any old cop,’ said Patten. ‘He got the job because he supervised the brutal 2019 crackdown on demonstrations in Hong Kong after two million residents protested against the city government’s plan to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China.’ Lee reached so eagerly for the tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets that Patten imagined that he would have ‘willingly suppressed the young demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989’.

Cardinal Zen wanted to help 2,200 people prosecuted after those demonstrations. His own eventual arrest was a foregone conclusion. President Xi Jinping detests the practice of religion and especially Christianity. He cannot herd his country’s 44 million Christians into concentration camps, which is what has happened to a million Muslim Uighurs, with some women being forced to abort their children. But he can demolish churches without warning and does so with relish. Catholic or Protestant, registered or unregistered – it makes little difference if the party wants to send in the bulldozers.