The Vatican has signed an agreement with China on the appointment of bishops. The Vatican statement is remarkably uninformative and the reason for that can only be that there is very little to communicate. This is not some huge deal encompassing all the outstanding issues between China and the Church. That may indeed come at some future point, and my hope is that it does come when and if China becomes a democracy, not before.
In the meantime, we have this ‘provisional’ deal which effectively rehabilitates several state-appointed bishops and makes them into Vatican-recognised bishops. Someone in the Vatican must have thought this a desirable idea, on the grounds that this not only brings the illegal bishops in from the cold, but brings in their flocks too, even if the state-appointed bishops are not the sort of men who ought to be bishops at all, or even priests, in some cases.
