When Pope Pius XI ordained six Chinese priests as bishops in St. Peterʼs Basilica on Oct. 28, 1926, he had picked each of them himself from lists sent from China.
A century later, bishops in mainland China are appointed under a controversial agreement the Holy See made with Beijing in 2018. Its text has never been published.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vaticanʼs secretary of state, defended the deal in a 2022 interview. New bishops, he said, were being ordained under a procedure “that leaves the pope the final and decisive say.” He called the results “small achievements” but “important steps toward the progressive healing of the wounds inflicted on ecclesial communion by the events of the past.”
Human Rights Watch said in 2025 the Vatican had never exercised its veto. Critics who spoke to EWTN News say the Chinese Communist Party now has a role in choosing bishops.
‘Spiritual colonies’
On the seventh anniversary of his own episcopal ordination in 1919, Pope Pius XI spoke of his joy at seeing the first “bishops of the native Chinese clergy” consecrated in Rome.
“Unlike the situation in China today, the 1926 consecrations of Chinese bishops were intended to give China native bishops, not to separate those bishops from the Holy See,” Anthony E. Clark, a professor of Chinese history at Whitworth University and a lay Dominican, told EWTN News.
Missions in China operated under a French protectorate at that time. Father Frédéric-Vincent Lebbe, a Vincentian who arrived in China after the Boxer Rebellion, said the missions had created “spiritual colonies” instead of living Churches. He was an early advocate for indigenizing the Chinese Church.
The concern was shared in Rome: Benedict XV, who issued the 1919 apostolic letter Maximum Illud, “wanted to remove European nationalism from the Chinese Church and empower Chinaʼs Catholics to cooperate with the pope in governing their own local community,” Clark told EWTN News.
Seven years later, Pope Pius XI put building up a native clergy “before everything else” in Rerum Ecclesiae.
Fenggang Yang, a Purdue University sociologist who directs its Center on Religion and the Global East, said the 1926 consecrations came “in a time of rising Chinese nationalism that targeted Christianity as a foreign religion under the protection of imperialist European countries.”
“Chinese leadership strengthened the Church’s claim to belong within Chinese society. However, the Catholic Church made the adjustment too little and too slow,” Yang told EWTN News.
By 1948, Fides figures show, only 14 of Chinaʼs 139 bishops were Chinese, but 2,690 of its 5,780 priests were.
From 1949 to 2018
After the communist victory of 1949, Pius XII rejected a “national” Church in Ad Sinarum Gentem and in 1958 condemned the first ordinations of bishops without a papal mandate in Ad Apostolorum Principis. Catholics were divided into registered and unregistered, or “underground,” communities, which Benedict XVI famously called to reconciliation in his 2007 letter.
Under Benedictʼs successor, Pope Francis, the Holy See and Beijing signed a “provisional agreement” on appointing bishops on Sept. 22, 2018. The deal was renewed three times, in 2020, 2022, and, for four years to October 2028, in 2024.
The Holy Seeʼs case
The deal sought “only to attain the Churchʼs specific spiritual and pastoral aims,” including “to reestablish and preserve the full and visible unity of the Catholic community in China,” Pope Francis wrote in 2018.
In a Fides essay, Father Paul Han, a mainland Chinese priest, wrote that the agreement “established a workable framework” and “avoided the long-standing divisions” between “public” and “underground” communities.
The process has not always run smoothly. In April 2023, Chinese authorities transferred Bishop Joseph Shen Bin from Haimen to Shanghai, informing the Holy See but without involving it in the decision as the agreement provides, Vatican News reported.
Pope Francis appointed Shen three months later, having “decided nevertheless to rectify the canonical irregularity” for the “greater good of the diocese,” Parolin said. Such a way of proceeding, the cardinal added, “seems to disregard the spirit of dialogue and collaboration” between the two sides.
During the 2025 sede vacante, official assemblies “elected” two candidates; the successor to Pope Francis, Leo XIV, approved both that August.
More recently, on Oct. 15, Father Ignatius Ding Zuyao was consecrated bishop of Haimen, the see Bishop Simon Zhu Kaimin led from 1926, after Leo approved his candidacy under the agreement. He is the 19th bishop selected under the deal.
‘Nominate’ and ‘choose’
Father Gianni Criveller, a PIME missionary and editorial director of AsiaNews who opened a centenary conference in Taipei this month, said “the situation of 1926 and today are quite different.”
In 1926, he said, the issue was “to overcome the resistance by many quarters, including foreign missionaries in China, to allow local clergy to govern their churches.” Archbishop Celso Costantini, the Holy Seeʼs first apostolic delegate to China, and Pius XI also “were able to overcome the French interference.”
“I am afraid now the interference comes from China authorities: In spite of the agreement in 2018 between the Vatican and China, the freedom for the Catholic Church is quite limited in China,” Criveller said. “The pope can nominate the bishops, but he can hardly choose them. And the nomination by the pope is not acknowledged during the ceremony of consecration of the bishops.”
“I am not in position to offer advice to the pope,” the missionary added. “I respect any popeʼs decision, and I understand that the Holy See seek dialogue and agreements. My point is that the agreement does not bring the benefits that we all hoped for. The freedom for Catholics in China is less than before.”
The critics’ case
Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute said Beijingʼs “Sinicization” policy means “Catholic teaching and evangelization must conform to Chinese Communist Party doctrine.”
“Pope Leo should support the Catholic underground in China, as the Church has done in other regions,” Shea said.
She warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping “seeks control over all civil society, including the Catholic Church.”
“Things have changed in China under communist rule,” Yang said. “The secret agreement since 2018 has pressed underground Catholics to go above ground, so that no new underground bishops have been consecrated.”
Some underground bishops who came above ground were then stripped of their episcopal functions, and some died without replacement, he said. “Therefore, the underground Catholic communities are in disarray.”
Meanwhile, Yang said, the China Catholic Patriotic Association “has strengthened its power over all Catholics in China” while implementing the partyʼs Sinicization policy.
People ask how Chinese the countryʼs Catholics are, he noted. “Another question people also ask is: How Chinese is the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]? Is the CCP primarily Chinese or primarily communist?”
“Over the next two years, Pope Leo XIV should set out the criteria and conditions for the renewal of the Sino-Vatican Agreement,” said Benedict Rogers, senior director at Fortify Rights.
“These criteria should include the release of all imprisoned or detained Catholic bishops, priests, and laity, including the release of Hong Kongʼs pro-democracy activist, 78-year-old Catholic and British citizen Jimmy Lai, currently serving a 20-year sentence,” Rogers told EWTN News on Oct. 27.
“The agreement should not be renewed if these criteria are not met.”
Toward 2028
Replying on behalf of Cardinal Stephen Chow of Hong Kong, the dioceseʼs communications office told EWTN News on Oct. 28 that he “is happy to see it moving forward,” citing this yearʼs “steadily increasing number” of episcopal ordinations, “all approved by the Holy Father.”
“In the short term, I will continue the policy that the Holy See has followed for some years now,” Leo XIV said in a 2025 interview.
“In the long term, I donʼt pretend to say this is what I will and will not do,” he added.
Pius XI told the six new bishops: “Please come to Rome more often, as traveling is getting easier,” Criveller recalled. “The pope said that in 1926! After 100 years, Chinese bishops cannot freely travel to Rome.”
Clark agreed. “Chinaʼs faithful wish they could return to 1926, when Chinese bishops were free to travel to Rome, meet the Holy Father, and be more integrated in the universal Church that they espouse,” he told EWTN News.
This month, two mainland bishops attended a Vatican meeting convened by Leo XIV.