The World Day of Prayer for the Catholic Church in China has been celebrated for fifteen years by the will of Benedict XVI who established it with his Letter to Chinese Catholics of 2007. This year falls into a particularly delicate phase in relations between the Holy See and Beijing. After the second renewal of the provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops, which took place in October 2022, there were two obvious forcings by the People’s Republic of China: in November the Vatican had denounced the violation of the agreement by the Chinese authorities with the appointment of Msgr. John Peng Weizhao as auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Jiangxi. In April, then, there was the inauguration of bishop Shen Bin in Shanghai, unilaterally transferred from the Haimen See by the Council of Chinese Bishops (not recognized by the Holy See and controlled by the Communist Party of China). It is since 8 September 2021 – now twenty months ago – that no episcopal appointment agreed with Rome has taken place in the Church in China, despite the fact that a third of Chinese dioceses are vacant today.
In this sense it is significant that Pope Francis, speaking of the proclamation of the Gospel in China, also used the term “freedom” and recalled that in the Catholic community there are also “pastors and faithful who suffer”. Between them – as we remembered a few days ago – there is, for example, the vicar of the diocese of Xuanhua in Hebei, mgr. Simone Zhang Jianlin has been under arrest for two years in the same diocese where the underground bishop Augustine Cui Tai has been subjected to periodic detention for 16 years.
After the pandemic in this month of May, even in China this year it was possible to return to celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Sheshan with pilgrimages. Archbishop Shen Bin presided last week at the Archdiocese of Shanghai during which he recited the prayer composed by Benedict XVI in 2008 on the occasion of the first World Day of Prayer for the Catholic Church in China. Pope Francis himself keeps in his room at Casa Santa Marta an image of Our Lady of Sheshan, as he himself showed Cardinal Joseph Zenbishop emeritus of Hong Kong, during the private audience granted to him in the Vatican last January.