By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“Cardinal Who?” you might ask.
We refer to Joseph Cardinal Zen Ze-kiun, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, raised to the Red Hat by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, and now the moral leader of not only Catholics, but of all freedom-loving Chinese subjects of Communist China’s new Great Leader, Xi Jinping.
Cardinal Zen has been under house arrest in Hong Kong since July, awaiting trial on trumped-up charges. His trial, originally scheduled for this week, has been postponed, reportedly because the judge has contracted the China Virus.
Cosmic justice.
China’s Communist regime today will have no other gods than Xi Jinping. All religion is thus political, and as a political leader (and thus immoral, by Xi’s tyrannical standards), Cardinal Zen is a light that must be hidden, and then quietly snuffed out.
And that’s just fine, it seems, with Pope Francis.
In the recent Consistory of Cardinals — the first in eight years — Cardinal Zen was absent — “unpersoned,” as the Thought Police might say.
“The extraordinary consistory would have been an opportunity to declare full solidarity with Zen on the part of all the cardinals of the College,” Gerhard Cardinal Mueller, former prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, told Il Messaggero earlier this month.
But what happened instead? “Nothing at all,” Cardinal Mueller says. “There are obviously political reasons on the part of the Holy See that prevent such initiatives. I am referring to the agreement for the renewal of bishops recently signed with the government of Xi. I am sorry to say this but we cannot submit the interests of the Holy See and the Vatican State to the ecclesial dimension and to the truth.”
“Next month there will be an unfair trial. No one has raised the very serious issue of our Brother Zen. It has not been done by the Dean [of the College of Cardinals], Cardinal Re, nor by the secretary of state, Parolin, nor by the Pope. There has been no document of solidarity, no prayer initiative for him.”
Well, the Vatican has another agenda. Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, who heads the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, tells La Stampa that “those who best realize the social doctrine of the Church at this time are the Chinese. They seek the common good, subordinating all things to the general good.”
All things including Cardinal Zen, apparently.
Mired in such mindless blather, everyone in the Vatican, including Pope Francis, has abandoned Cardinal Zen. Anxious to preserve Cardinal Parolin’s secret deal struck with Xi in 2018, Francis refused to defend Cardinal Zen as recently as last week, when he refused to call Zen’s arrest a violation of religious freedom. The Pope complained instead that “it is not easy to understand the Chinese mentality….To understand China takes a century, and we won’t see a century.”
Babble as he may, the Pope understands Cardinal Zen’s mentality, and he doesn’t like it. “Cardinal Zen is going to trial these days, I think. And he says what he feels, and you can see that there are some limitations there,” he said.
Profound. But he is quick to add that he “respects” the Chinese Communist regime, and that the Holy See in its engagement with them has chosen “the path of dialogue.”
The Chinese Church
Is Dying For Dialogue
For years the Vatican has quietly wished that Cardinal Zen would shut up, but His Eminence won’t. Three years ago this month, he wrote a letter to all the members of the College of Cardinals, “because we cardinals have the grave responsibility to help the Holy Father in guiding the Church.”
“It is quite clear,” he wrote, that the Vatican’s “Pastoral Guidelines” (written after the secret agreement with Xi) “encourage the faithful in China to enter a schismatic church (independent of the Pope and under the orders of the Communist Party)…why must such an agreement be secret, and why is it not granted even to me, a Chinese cardinal, to see it?” he asked.
He didn’t stop there. In July 2019, Cardinal Zen submitted to the Pope his own Dubia. It was a scathing attack that exposed the duplicity of the Vatican’s entire approach to dealing with Xi’s regime.
His argument goes straight to the source of the evil — the Vatican’s Secretary of State.
“Cardinal Parolin quotes a sentence from Pope Benedict’s letter completely out of context — indeed, diametrically opposed to the whole paragraph. This manipulation of the Pope Emeritus’ thought is gravely disrespectful; indeed, it is a deplorable insult to the person of such a meek Pope, who is still alive.”
“But it also disgusts me,” he continues, “that they often declare that what they are doing is in continuity with the thought of the previous Pope, while the opposite is true. I have reason to believe (and I hope one day to be able to prove with archival documents) that the agreement signed is the same one that Pope Benedict had, at the time, refused to sign.”
“Your Eminence, can we passively witness the murder of the Church in China by those who should protect and defend her from her enemies?”
“Begging on my knees, your brother,” the letter ends.
Basta! Enough! “Archival documents” that might prove how Francis has betrayed the beloved Pope Benedict XVI, as indicated above?
This man is dangerous. He must be disappeared.
When Cardinal Zen was given permission to leave Hong Kong for three days to visit Rome two years ago, Pope Francis refused to see him.
“Too busy.”
Down Is Up
While the Vatican has shoved Cardinal Zen down the Memory Hole, support for Communist China’s most prominent political prisoner has come from a most surprising direction: Strasbourg, and the European Parliament.
When Cardinal Zen was arrested in July, that body passed a Resolution “condemn[ing] the arrests of Cardinal Joseph Zen, one of the strongest advocates of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and of the other four trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund,” the body said. The Resolution noted that these and similar repressive actions “constitute an attack on the freedoms guaranteed in the Hong Kong Basic Law, including the freedom of religion or belief.”
Curious. Dr. Carlos Beltramo, who heads the European office of the Population Research Institute, reports that the Parliament, elected by the member states of the European Union, passed another resolution that same month, this one condemning the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization!
Parliament “Strongly condemns once again the backsliding in women’s rights and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) taking place globally, including in the U.S.,” it read, recommending that the EU “use all instruments at their disposal to strengthen their actions to counteract the backsliding in women’s rights and SRHR, including by compensating for any possible reduction in U.S. funding to SRHR globally, and by strongly advocating and prioritizing universal access to safe and legal abortion and other SRHR in their external relations.”
The European Parliament “supports, likewise, the calls for the U.S. Congress to pass a bill protecting abortion at federal level,” it concluded.
It is painful indeed to see the radical pro-abortion, pro-population control European Parliament filling in the vacuum that should be overflowing with the outrage of a Holy Father blasting the Communist persecution of the Catholic Church throughout China, in the person of its most valiant Catholic prelate.
We must pray for Joseph Cardinal Zen and his persecutors — both in China and in the Vatican.
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