Last week the Vatican made its most important intervention on China since it announced a “provisional agreement” with the communist authorities in September. It unveiled new guidelines for priests and bishops on the vexed issue of “civil registration”.
To understand why these new “pastoral orientations” are significant, we must go back to February 2018, when China introduced new regulations requiring Catholic clergy to be registered with the government and to align themselves with the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. In order to register, priests and bishops are asked to sign a document accepting the “independence, autonomy and self-administration” of the Church in China.
