By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Last Friday, November 23, a judge in Hong Kong ruled that Joseph Cardinal Zen, retired archbishop of Hong Kong, and five other defendants were guilty of failing to register a “protester relief fund,” now defunct, as a society. The defendants were fined between HK$2,500 and HK$4,000 (USD $300 – $500) each.
Was justice done? I recall a passage from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: “The judge knows what verdict to give. Often he has already received a written order to give it. If he doesn’t know, he has a telephone. . . .”
Pope Francis had signaled his own view in advance of the proceedings. “Cardinal Zen is going to trial these days, I think. And he says what he feels, and you can see that there are limitations there,” he said on the way back to Rome from Kazakhstan in September.
The Pope’s comments came in the midst of an interview in which he defended the Vatican’s recent renewal of its secret agreement with China’s Communist Regime.
“To understand China takes a century, and we don’t live a century. . . . To understand we have chosen the path of dialogue, open to dialogue. . . . The Chinese pace is slow, they have an eternity to move forward: They are a people of infinite patience,” he said.
The Chinese correctly interpreted the Pope’s remarks as a sign of his casual indifference regarding the Xi regime’s attacks on the Church in China. In the language of American politics, “the doormat rolled over.”
It didn’t take the “infinitely patient” Chinese Communists “an eternity” to seize the opportunity. In addition to delivering Cardinal Zen’s conviction, Great Leader Xi’s government violated the terms of its agreement with the Vatican last week by installing, without Vatican approval, Bishop John Peng Weizhao as an “Auxiliary Bishop of Jiangxi.”
In response to the breach, the Vatican Press Office expressed the Holy See’s “surprise and regret” — but Xi’s defiance was no more shocking to the Vatican than Captain Renault’s discovery that gambling was going on at Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca.
Behold Communist
China’s “Mortal God”
The Chinese Communist Party didn’t stop with merely appointing a successor to the apostles for the Catholic Church in Jiangxi. It also appointed a new savior.
Last December, according to Reuters, in an “unprecedented meeting organized by the mainland’s representative office in Hong Kong,” Chinese officials schooled Hong Kong Catholic clergy on President Xi Jinping’s socialistic vision of religion.
Two weeks ago, the meeting was convened for a second time, just one month after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had named President Xi Jinping to an unprecedented third term as its leader.
This time, the hammer came down hard as the sickle loomed close behind.
The proceedings began with a speech by Bishop Joseph Shen Bin, president of China’s Catholic bishops’ conference. As reported by the National Catholic Register:
“Bishop Shen Bin stressed that, at the October Congress, President Xi had ‘once again put forward the requirement of adhering to the direction of Sinicization of religion in China and actively guiding religion to adapt to the socialist society’ and that the Catholic Church in China was going along with this, becoming ‘gradually determined to follow the path of Sinicization that is compatible with the socialist society in terms of pastoral care, evangelization and formation.’
“He also predicted that the online exchange, ‘guided by the spirit’ of the 20th National Congress, would fully implement ‘Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,’ and would adhere ‘to the direction of Sinicization of Catholicism in China’.”
President Xi has become the strongest ruler in China since Mao. And he doesn’t cotton to competition.
Four hundred years ago Thomas Hobbes, the first modern political theorist and the father of amoral absolutism, called the Leviathan a “mortal god.” Today, Xi Jinping has proudly embraced that role.
So let the word go forth:
In the Sinicized Catholic Church of China, it will “Dear Leader” Xi himself who begets the truth, Xi who proclaims it, and Xi’s spirit that guides it.
Great Leader Xi Jinping has replaced all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
“So it shall be written, so it shall be done” (with apologies to Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston).
What’s left is just another heretical cadaver of an imposter church.
Once more, the True Church is driven into the catacombs.
Xi’s Special Gift For Biden
Steve Mosher, the China expert who revealed the Communist Party’s forced abortion program forty years ago, once explained to me the literal meaning of “Kow Tow.”
The term means “Hit Head.” And in the context of Imperial China, it required that a supplicant to the emperor hit his head nine times on the stone floor before the throne — with each “hit” loud enough for the emperor to hear it.
When Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping in Bali last month, Biden was doing his best to hit nine out of nine. The Associated Press account was almost risible. “Biden has repeatedly taken China to task for human rights abuses against the Uyghur people and other ethnic minorities, crackdowns on democracy activists in Hong Kong. . . .”
So did Biden “take Xi to task”?
Unfortunately, no.
Biden’s role of supplicant to the imperial throne silenced him.
Chinese manufacturers cooperate with Mexico’s drug-trafficking Coyote gangs to import Fentanyl into the U.S., killing 100,000 Americans a year, Mosher reports.
Did Biden challenge Xi on that murderous operation?
How could he? His lethal open borders policy made it possible.
“Another topic that went unmentioned by Biden is the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs,” Mosher adds. “The incarceration of the men, the sterilization of the women, and the enslavement of the young is an ongoing crime against humanity. The previous administration declared it to be genocide, and it still is.”
Silent Joe remained silent.
Lastly, Biden didn’t bring up Xi’s outright attack on the United States with the COVID pandemic. “He neither demanded an investigation into the Wuhan lab, nor insisted on reparations for the havoc its engineered virus has wreaked all over the world….Biden simply let China off the hook,” Mosher says.
Instead, Biden urged Xi, the world’s biggest polluter, to join in the Global Warming crusade, quietly winking at China’s modernization program that opens a new coal-fired power plant every two weeks.
In view of the massive demonstrations in China against Xi’s latest massive COVID lockdowns nationwide, the White House press room has continued Biden’s habit of obsequious capitulation.
Word has it that, on Biden’s return from Bali, Air Force Two (the follow-on plane for press and staff) carried a package containing a personal gift from the Dear Leader to be delivered directly to Biden’s White House Press spokesman.
The package contains nine large stones, prepared in advance for easy installation on the floor of the White House Press Room, and readily available for repeated Kow-Towing by administration officials before addressing any questions about Biden’s China policy.
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