The new Pope, Leo XIV, should direct an urgent review of the Vatican's 2018 agreement with the Chinese government that allows Beijing to appoint bishops for government-approved houses of worship, Human Rights Watch said today. He should also press the government to end the persecution of underground churches, clergy, and worshipers.
The Chinese government has continued to install Chinese Communist Party-compliant clergy. AsiaNews reported that during the mourning period for Pope Francis, who died on April 21, 2025, that the Chinese government had moved forward on the appointments of an auxiliary bishop in Shanghai and the bishop of Xinxiang, Henan province.
"Pope Leo XIV has an opportunity to make a fresh start with China to protect the religious freedom of China's Catholics," said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. "The new Pope should press for negotiations that could help improve the right to religious practice for everyone in China."
The Chinese government has long restricted the country's estimated 12 million Catholics to worship in official churches under the leadership of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, and has persecuted Catholics who have attended underground "house churches" or pledged allegiance only to the pope. The government has conducted frequent raids on underground churches and arrested unapproved clergy and congregants.
Pope Leo should press the Chinese government to immediately free several Catholic clergy who in recent years have been imprisoned, forcibly disappeared, or subjected to house arrest and other harassment, Human Rights Watch said. They include James Su Zhimin, Augustine Cui Tai, Julius Jia Zhiguo, Joseph Zhang Weizhu, Peter Shao Zhumin, and Thaddeus Ma Daqin, as reported by the Hudson Institute.
The 2018 Provisional Agreement regarding the Appointment of Bishops, the full text of which has never been made public, ended a decades-long standoff over who had the authority to appoint bishops in China. Under the agreement, Beijing proposes future bishops, and the pope has veto power over those appointments.
Since the 2018 agreement, the two parties have agreed on the appointment of 10 bishops, covering about a third of the over 90 dioceses in China that remained without a bishop. The Vatican has never exercised its veto power, however, even when the Chinese government violated the agreement by unilaterally appointing bishops in 2022 and 2023, appointments that Pope Francis later accepted.
In a 2024 news statement renewing the 2018 agreement, the Vatican stated that it aimed to "benefit … the Catholic Church in China and the Chinese people as a whole." The Holy See and the Chinese government have renewed the agreement three times.
The Chinese government, which restricts all religious practice in China to five officially recognized religions, regulates official church business and retains control over personnel appointments, publications, finances, and seminary applications.
The 2018 Holy See-China agreement was reached during President Xi Jinping's drive to tighten already stringent controls over religions in China in the name of "Sinicization" of religion. In recent years the authorities have demolished hundreds of church buildings or the crosses atop them, prevented adherents from gathering in unofficial churches, restricted access to the Bible, confiscated religious materials not authorized by the government, and banned Bible and religious apps.
The 2018 Holy See-China agreement was reached during a period of intensified repression, including crimes against humanity, of the predominantly Muslim Uyghur population. Since 2017, Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang region have arbitrarily detained about one million Uyghurs, many for practicing Islam, and have damaged or destroyed two-thirds of the region's mosques, according to the think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs remain imprisoned in China and subject to strict controls.
The Chinese government's Sinicization of religion has meant ruthless repression of Buddhism in Tibet, where the Chinese authorities have imposed strict controls over the process of selecting Tibetan lamas, including by forcibly disappearing the six-year-old Panchen Lama since 1995, and by controlling the process for the selection of the future Dalai Lama.
"Chinese Catholics worshiping in underground churches are among the 'ordinary people' on whom Pope Leo has said the church should focus its attention," Wang said. "It's critical for religious freedom in China that the Catholic church stands on their side, and not on the side of their oppressors."
