Papal Notes - Lion in Winter pushes back at Francis

"For anyone who knows Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 86-year-old “Lion in Winter” of Chinese

Catholicism, it will be no surprise that he recently took to Facebook to accuse the Vatican of “selling out” the Church in China by reportedly asking for the resignations of two underground bishops in order to make way for government-appointed candidates.

 The Vatican has its own long history of trying to accommodate Beijing, in an effort to clear the way for establishing diplomatic relations....
For the last quarter-century or so, there’s been a well-recognized dynamic in Sino-Vatican relations that goes like this:

• Some apparent thaw – a positive notice about the pope in the Chinese press, or a bishop released from prison – will cause breathless predictions of a breakthrough, sometimes featuring learned forecasts in The Economist or other prestigious venues.
• Soon after, there will be a step back – a church is bulldozed someplace, or a priest gets arrested, or the Chinese are irked by something a Vatican official says – and progress seems to stall.
• Six months later, we’re back where we started.

The truth is that the main impediment to a deal has never been on the Vatican side, which is eager to move forward. Among China’s ruling elite, however, there’s a

longstanding split between moderates who like the idea of closer ties with the leading spiritual symbol of the West, and ideological hard-liners who fear foreign influence.

 The Vatican has its own diplomatic corps, aspiring to be a voice of conscience on the global stage - never more so than in the Pope Francis era, when, from immigration and climate change

to nuclear disarmament and the dangers of “ideological colonization,” the Vatican is active on a wide range of fronts." CRUX
....and all the world wondered after the beast. Revelation 13:3