April 11 marks 80 years since Pope Pius XII issued the apostolic constitution Quotidie Nos, which established the ordinary ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Catholic Church in China and raised it from centuries of missionary status.

This 1946 decree organized the country into 20 metropolitan archdioceses, 79 dioceses and 38 apostolic prefectures (pre-diocesan missionary jurisdictions). The pontiff from 1939 to 1958 sought to indigenize Catholicism in China rather than maintain perceptions that it was a foreign and colonial entity.

However, Pope Pius XII’s efforts to develop a lasting, Vatican-aligned Catholic Church in China was soon undone when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power on Oct. 1, 1949.  

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In the years before his passing, Pope Pius XII warned Catholics in China that participation in CCP-related organizations would risk excommunication and he wrote that a national Church would no longer be Catholic (Ad Sinarum gentem, 1954). 

The most comprehensive rebuke Pius XII rendered against Communist China came in his penultimate encyclical Ad Apostolorum principis, published on June 29, 1958, an outline of the systemic persecution of bishops, priests, religious and lay faithful and the subversive efforts of the government to establish a patriotic Catholic Church independent of Rome. The  Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) was instituted in 1957, a year before Pius XII's death.

Navigating relations with the powerful authoritarian state has remained a matter of great complexity for each of Pius XII’s seven successors to the Chair of St. Peter.

Nina Shea, a senior fellow and director for the Centre for Religious Freedom for the Hudson Institute think tank, is closely observing how China-Holy See relations are developing in year one of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate.

This is an issue of importance for the former member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom as she authored a study in October 2024 titled Ten Persecuted Catholic Bishops in China. This report documents apparent power imbalances in the Sino-Vatican deal originally signed in 2018, since re-upped for multiple two-year terms before a four-year extension was signed on Oct. 22, 2024, and shares the accounts of 10 servants of the Catholic Church oppressed by the regime.

At present, Shea is advocating for the release of Catholic businessman and pro-democracy advocate Jimmy Lai, who was arrested in August 2020 and sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment in February for violating China’s National Security Law (NSL), which criminalizes “secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign collusion." The NSL has been critiqued by the international community over its vagueness and its usage as a coercive instrument to silence dissent and indict opponents of the CCP.

Shea took note of how Pope Leo XIV told media on March 3 that he “cannot comment” about Lai’s imprisonment, just over four months since meeting Lai’s wife, Teresa, and daughter, Claire.

“I was very disappointed when I heard that,” said Shea. “A lot of us are asking ‘why not? Why can't you speak out on it?’ It seems like it's the least they could do. The Pope has a great moral platform and he's not using it for China. And it's distorting the world's image of what that regime is like. They do not see it as a threat to freedom, which it is across the board.”

The longtime international human rights lawyer accentuated that Lai was “extremely generous to the Church” since his conversion to Catholicism in 1997.

“He wrote many cheques worth millions of dollars to sustain and rebuild the churches throughout China,” said Shea. “He was very close to the Church. Why can't the Pope lead prayers for him? I don't understand that.”

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Shea awaits to see if the May 14-15 summit in China between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping can secure Lai’s release.

In a broader reproachment, Shea lamented how Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is continuing a policy of quiet diplomacy and “no criticism” approach towards China. Shea stated that Parolin’s longer-term goals to ultimately secure a one-on-one meeting between the Pope and Xi Jinping and a “stable presence” in China are unrealistic.

“It is so far removed from anything that the Chinese Communist Party has indicated it's interested in,” said Shea. “It does not want an ideological competitor like Catholicism or any other ideology. It wants to dominate the culture and has demonstrated that by just banning all children from any exposure to religion in China.”

Indeed, in several Chinese provinces, including Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Henan, there are rules strictly prohibiting anyone under 18 from entering houses of worship. Churches and religious groups are also banned from organizing camps or formation programs for kids.

Churches in China registered with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPA) or the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) are closely monitored by the state to ensure all preached orthodoxy is in alignment with CCP ideology. Another pillar of the effort to “sinicize” religion is the ongoing project to rewrite the Bible and other sacred texts to align with socialist values and “Xi Jinping Thought.”

Another front for criticism is the CCP’s repeated contraventions of the Sino-Vatican agreement by making unilateral bishop appointments without papal consent, including two during the “seda vacante” period between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV.

A statement issued on Feb. 4 of this year by the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China (BCCC) illustrated the regime’s effectiveness in appointing loyalists of episcopal authority. The BCCC fully endorsed the government’s ban on pastoral work by unregistered clergy and using unauthorized sites for worship.

“Religious groups must comply with relevant laws and regulations when conducting religious activities,” stated the BCCC. The body added that observance of these rules is in the “national and public interest.”

Shea told EWTN in the aftermath of this development that the BCCC was supporting “the suppression of Chinese Catholicism” and that “Pope Leo should immediately summon them to Rome to review their episcopal authority.”

Decisions related to China made by Leo since his election as Pope include appointing former underground Bishop Joseph Lin Yuntuan as an auxiliary for the Archdiocese of Fuzhou, a move agreed to by Beijing. On Sept. 10, he suppressed two historical dioceses erected by Pope Pius XII in 1946 — Xiwanzi and Xuanhua — and replaced them with the Diocese of Zhangjiakou. The city of Zhangjiakou, the see of the new diocese, is where the CCPA set up a diocese in 1980 without Vatican approval.

During an interview with Crux later in September, Leo said that in the short term, "I will continue the policy that the Holy See has followed for some years now. But I am also in ongoing dialogue with a number of people, Chinese, on both sides of some of the issues that are there.”

He noted that he is in dialogue with a “significant group of Chinese Catholics who for many years have lived some kind of oppression or difficulty in living their faith.”

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Shea’s recommended course of action for Pope Leo XIV to help the Christian faith flourish in a hostile, repressive climate is supporting the underground Church.

“I think the only way this Church is going to survive is with an underground,” she stated. “And the Catholic Church has a practice of underground movements. We saw that in Ukraine for many years under the Soviet regime when they tried to liquidate the Greek Catholic Church. And there was an underground during the Cultural Revolution in China itself, and that's how the Church survived.”