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To the gesture of Pope Francis who on the same day as the signing of the agreement with China exonerated from excommunication the seven bishops forcibly installed in recent years by the communist party without the approval of the Holy See, the Chinese authority responded by designating themselves the two bishops who will go to Rome to participate in the upcoming world synod:
It is the first time that this has happened, and the decision seems to be a taste of what is to come with future episcopal appointments, on the basis of the agreement stipulated with the two sides. An agreement whose contents have not been made known, but that evidently is not impartial.
While in the past, first in 1998 and then in 2005, the Chinese bishops invited to the synods of those years by John Paul II and Benedict XVI respectively never received authorization to go to Rome, today instead the opposite has happened. The Beijing authorities have been the ones to designate the bishops to send to the synod, and Rome has not raised any objections. It was the Chinese high official Wang Zuo’an, director of the state administration for religious affairs, who made their designation public.
The two selected are John Baptist Yang Xiaoting, bishop of Yan’an-Yulin, and Joseph Guo Jincai, bishop of Chengde. Both of them have long been highly docile executors of the commands of the Chinese authorities, and the latter - one of the seven absolved from excommunication - is also general secretary of the pseudo episcopal conference of Chinese bishops, which still does not include the “clandestine” bishops who are in communion with Rome but not recognized by the regime.
Today the known “clandestine” bishops number 17, 7 of whom are well above the age of 75. And two of them now find themselves flanked, in their respective dioceses, by two government-appointed bishops pardoned in recent days by the pope. In the diocese of Shantou the “clandestine” bishop is 87 and could be replaced easily. But in that of Xiapu-Mindong the “clandestine” bishop Vincent Guo Xijin, 56, will have to step aside for his competitor Vincent Zhan Silu, bowing to the “sacrifice” asked of him by the Vatican last winter. Here too in confirmation of how the Chinese regime finds itself at an advantage over its counterpart.
On all the bishops currently present in China - on whose names the Annuario Pontificio is silent, except for those of Hong Kong and Macao - Settimo Cielo furnished a detailed organizational chart last February, on the basis of the highly informative book by the vaticanista Gianni Cardinale that came out at the beginning of this year from the presses of Libreria Editrice Vaticana:
But it must be added that in the diocese of Ningbo, where the last known bishop, named Hu Xiande, “clandestine,” died on September 25, 2017, the Holy See limited itself to stating that “the successor has taken possession of the diocese”: a sign that there must be a new bishop there who also is not recognized by the Chinese government, whose identity has however not been revealed.
A further observation concerns the strange case of the eighth bishop from whom last September 22 Pope Francis lifted the excommunication not while he was alive, but after he had died.
In the papal act of withdrawal of excommunication it is in fact written that this bishop, Anthony Tu Shihua, a Franciscan, who passed away on January 4 of 2017, “before dying had expressed the desire to be reconciled with the apostolic see.”
“L’Osservatore Romano” did not publish an obituary for this bishop, just as for every illegitimate bishop who has passed away without being reconciled with the Church, either publicly or in the internal forum.
There are therefore two possible explanations for the “post mortem” absolution granted by Pope Francis in recent days.
Either the Holy See found out only long after his death that he wanted to be reconciled. Or the Chinese government absolutely demanded from Rome his posthumous rehabilitation. And got it.