The betrayal of the Church in China
SIR – Your leader, “East of Eden” (May 3), expresses timely if overly respectful doubt about current Vatican policy in China. I have never trusted China on any point since 1949 when, as a member of the Labour League of Youth, I cut out articles from the Manchester Guardian explaining Mao’s rise to power. I wish I still had them to quote here.
As editor of the Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) Mirror in 1986, I wrote a brief illustrated biographical memoir of Cardinal Mindszenty, “The Valiant Shepherd”. I quoted the cardinal: “The history of Bolshevism … shows that the Church cannot make any conciliatory gesture expecting that the regime will in turn abandon its persecution of religion. That persecution follows from the essence and the internal nature of its ideology.”
