FILE – A person prays at the Xishiku Catholic Church, in Beijing, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File) The Chinese Communist Party is using the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association to promote a controversial new law designed to assimilate ethnic minorities.
The association, the official, state-sanctioned Catholic Church in China, has put its resources behind the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress. On April 30, the European parliament called for the repeal of the Chinese law, which it declared “openly promotes assimilation policies and restricts the cultural, religious and linguistic freedoms of various groups within China and beyond.”
While promoting the law, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association has ignored Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitas,” despite the encyclical’s direct relevance to the questions of cultural rights and protection of minorities.
Bitter Winter, a magazine that focuses on religious freedom and human rights in China, reported that local clergy were told to stress that the national law takes precedence over religious convictions, and believers must show loyalty to the state. The vigorous endorsement of the new ethnic law by the Chinese Communist Party’s recognized Catholic body comes at the same time that the party is trying to “Sinicize” religion to make it align with its values. Xi Jinping started this campaign in 2016.
“Catholic doctrine is being ‘Sinicized’ in accordance with party dictates,” Piero Tozzi, the senior China director of the America First Policy Institute, told me this month.
The goal, according to Bitter Winter, is to ensure that Catholicism and the other four official religions “deepen their ideological alignment with the Chinese Communist Party,” which is officially atheist. Therefore, Catholics are discouraged from studying scripture, theology or Vatican teachings.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has defined the Sinicization of religion as “the complete subordination of religious groups to the [party’s] political agenda and Marxist vision for religion.”
In recent years, Xi has intensified the nationwide effort. In December 2023, for instance, the Catholic Patriotic Association issued a five-year plan to intensify the Sinicization of Catholicism. Last December, China’s National Religious Affairs Administration began a nationwide campaign called “Study the Regulations, Observe Discipline, Cultivate Virtue, and Build a Good Image,” which in practice means studying Xi’s thoughts on religion.
Moreover, this April, Catholics were ordered to implement the instructions of the 2026 national training session on the “Sinicization of Catholicism,” held at the Central Institute of Socialism in Beijing. Bishop Li Shan of Beijing, chairman of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, opened the session by stating that the goal of “religious work in the new era” is to implement Xi directives. Catholicism, he stated, must reflect “Chinese characteristics” — in other words, Communist Party directives.
As Bitter Winter noted, “The message was that Catholicism, if it is to exist at all, must be re-engineered to serve the state’s political project.”
The result, as a Catholic newspaper put it in November, is Catholicism in China is in “crisis.”
The problem was exacerbated by the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with Beijing, which was supposed to heal a decades-long divide. That pact, extended three times, is secret, but it has ended a dispute, going back to 1951 when the new Communist government severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See and established the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association in 1957.
Until the 2018 agreement, the Vatican’s church in China was underground and Beijing-appointed bishops were subject to excommunication. The deal ended that disagreement over bishop appointments by giving the Pope final authority over selection.
That was a victory for the Vatican, at least theoretically. As a practical matter, the story is less clear.
“The Sino-Vatican accord is a failure,” Tozzi stated, pointing out that the Chinese government violated the agreement’s terms by unilaterally appointing bishops as well as redrawing diocesan lines.
Beijing tells Catholics that the Vatican, by inking the agreement, has ordered them to join the Patriotic Church, but in 2019 the Holy See publicly stated that was not the case. Nonetheless, the damage was already done.
The Chinese regime keeps repeating the line that Catholics must abandon underground congregations. The state-sanctioned Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church, in a Feb. 4 statement, supported the regime’s prohibition on unregistered clergy engaging in pastoral activities.
Beijing has predictably tried to use the Patriotic Association to persecute the underground church, but now it is also using the group to get the church on record on a matter that is tangential to religion — the ethnic unity law. So far, the Vatican has remained silent.
As the Bitter Winter story notes, “The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church has entered a new phase of political usefulness.”
“A Church that sees itself as part of the Catholic communion would naturally engage with a major papal document,” it points out. However, the Patriotic Church “does not understand itself as a branch of the universal Church but as a domestic institution tasked with advancing the [Chinese Communist Party’s] political objectives.”
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” and “The Coming Collapse of China.“
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