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Notes -
I know we have a bunch of Catholic Church nerds on this forum. So I want to ask you all about the current relationship between the Church and China. What is the life of a congregant/decon/monk/nun/priest/bishop like in China? To what extent does the church exist above ground with the CCP's approval and to what extent does it exist below ground? To what extent is it oppressed?
Effortpost please :)
The current status is that there is an above ground church. Officials(clergy etc) in the above ground church are legally required to be members in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, a communist front group which picks bishops and disciplines priests for hewing too close to Catholic doctrines the CCP doesn’t like. Non-Chinese Catholics are generally agreed to be dispensed from mass attendance inside red China and the Vatican does not impose penalties on the CPCA.
China also has an underground church about which virtually nothing is known except that it was stronger when John Paul II let them consecrate underground bishops to replace the ones martyred. There may still be underground bishops being consecrated in technical violation of canon law; the Vatican is supremely uninterested in excommunicating them. Most Catholics in China attend underground services at least occasionally(unlike in the gulf countries, underground priests are largely local) but underground church only Catholics are agreed to be a minority.
Edit to add- in Conservative Muslim countries, the underground church usually uses nonresident priests who say masses in private. Red China is unique in having a theoretically aboveboard structure to go along with it; the soviets tried to have this but failed and tended to lapse into persecution. To read about the experience of a Catholic priest ministering under persecution in the Soviet Union, With God in Russia by Fr Walter Ciszek is generally agreed as the best account. Nothing of the sort has been published for either red China or the gulf countries.
Unauthorised consecrations are a latae sententiae excommunication, so failing to publish the excommunications doesn't mean that people are not excommunicated (and given that we are dealing with the most observant Catholics, this probably matters). That said, it is entirely plausible that the Church has secretly authorised these consecrations.
In practice, that is not how it works- excommunications are publicized as a judgement that the extenuating factors don’t apply. The lack of publication of excommunications serves as a judgement that whatever reason they have for doing it(in this case, almost certainly persecution) is good enough to dispense from the law.
Lone cranks doing crank things under the radar is the reason for the látame sententiae cannons, when high profile behavior goes unpunished it can be assumed to be judged not excommunicating.
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