CCP Is Using the Vatican to Destroy China's Underground Catholic Church

In 2018, Pope Francis signed a secret agreement with the Chinese Communist Party giving Beijing a formal role in appointing Catholic bishops in China. The full text has never been made public. The stated goal was reconciliation — uniting China's state-approved Catholic church with the underground congregations that had remained loyal to Rome for decades at great personal cost. What actually happened is documented in exhaustive detail by Human Rights Watch, Foreign Policy, and the UN: Beijing took the agreement as a green light to accelerate the destruction of every Catholic community it hadn't yet absorbed. Under the deal's cover, authorities in Shaanxi province rescheduled church services to inconvenient hours to reduce attendance. A church in Henan province was shut down in December 2025 because minors had been allowed to play musical instruments inside. In September 2025, an internal document from the Central United Front Leading Group — a high-level CCP body — directed schools to "guide students to proactively report" parents who provide any home-based religious education to their children. Over the past decade, the CCP has stripped legal status from virtually every Catholic-run orphanage and disability center in China, transferring the children to state institutions. Surveillance cameras have been installed inside official churches. Clergy are forbidden from traveling abroad or collaborating with foreign churches. Six Catholic bishops remain forcibly disappeared or imprisoned — some for decades — and the Vatican has not publicly demanded their release once. Beijing has violated the agreement at least twice, appointing bishops without papal approval, and the Vatican said nothing. When Pope Francis died in April 2025, the CCP moved immediately to appoint two new bishops during the mourning period before a new pope had even been elected. Pope Leo XIV, who took office in May 2025, has been urged by Human Rights Watch to demand an urgent review of the agreement and press for the release of imprisoned clergy before the deal comes up for renewal in 2028. So far, Beijing is not worried.

AI Generated with ChatGPT

Commentary: The CCP convinced the Vatican to sign a secret deal that Beijing has violated repeatedly, used to surveil congregations, shut down orphanages, and have children report their parents for praying at home — and the Catholic Church's response has been to renew it three times and stay silent about the six bishops it can't account for. Xi Jinping got the Pope to help him destroy the underground church, and it didn't even cost him a public concession. That's not diplomacy. That's submission.

📰 https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/04/15/china-pressure-on-catholics-escalates

Additional sources: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/28/china-pope-francis-bishops-xi-jinping-uyghurs/ | https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/12/holy-see-review-vatican-china-agreement

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from Human Rights Watch April 2026 report, Foreign Policy, and HRW's May 2025 report to Pope Leo XIV.

CCP Is Hunting Christians in the Middle of the Night

 In October 2025, Chinese security forces launched one of the most coordinated crackdowns on Christianity seen in decades. In a single overnight operation, plainclothes and uniformed police fanned out across at least seven cities — Beijing, Shanghai, and five others — simultaneously detaining nearly 30 pastors, preachers, and congregation members of Zion Church, one of China's largest unofficial Protestant congregations with roughly 5,000 members nationwide. The operation's centerpiece was the arrest of Zion's 56-year-old founder and senior pastor, Ezra Jin Mingri, snatched while traveling in the southern city of Beihai. Church members describe watching the dragnet in real time, realizing from the speed and geographic reach that this was no ordinary raid — the CCP had been planning it for months. The detained were held incommunicado, with families receiving no information about their whereabouts and lawyers allowed only sporadic contact. The typical charge, applied with cynical precision: fraud. The government's logic is that since it does not recognize these pastors as legitimate clergy, collecting tithes from a congregation constitutes fraudulent solicitation. Within weeks, authorities escalated further — raiding another unofficial church in Wenzhou in December 2025, arresting approximately 100 members over five days, and surrounding the building with hundreds of armed police and bulldozers. In January 2026, they hit again, raiding the home of the current leader of Chengdu's Early Rain Covenant Church and taking him into custody. The crackdown is part of Xi Jinping's years-long "Sinicization" campaign — a program designed to remake every religion in China into an ideological arm of the Communist Party, rewriting scripture, banning unauthorized Bibles, demolishing crosses, and ensuring that Chinese Christians worship the Party first and God second.

Commentary: The CCP's approach to Christianity is simple and efficient: worship however you like, as long as what you're worshipping is us. Any congregation that insists on placing God above the General Secretary gets labeled a fraud operation, its pastors hauled away in the night, and its building surrounded by bulldozers — all perfectly legal under laws the Party wrote for exactly this purpose. It's religious freedom, Beijing-style.

📰 https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/25/china-churches-crackdown-xi-zion-jin-mingri/

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating reporting from Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.