The White-Martyr Cardinals’ Dinner – Catholic World Report

On the night of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s funeral, Cardinal George Pell hosted a dinner in his apartment for a bunch of like-minded mourners, and all present were delighted that the heroic Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong, who had been permitted to attend the Requiem by Hong’s Kong’s thugocracy, agreed to affix the party. The corporate assembled at #1, Piazza della Città Leonina, could thus marvel at being within the presence of two contemporary “white-martyrs:” men who had suffered greatly for the religion but had remained unbroken and stuffed with the enjoyment of the Lord.

As Windfall would have it, Cardinal Pell, in hosting that dinner, “provided his own Irish wake” (as one among those present remarked after Pell’s unexpected death five days later). It was an apt description of a magical evening, during which the predominant mood of profound gratitude for Benedict XVI animated hours of sturdy conversation, stuffed with wit and laughter. And as Cardinal Pell remarked afterwards, “Cardinal Zen really was the star tonight, wasn’t he?” Indeed, he was.

At 91 years old and suffering irritating physical disabilities, the Shanghai-born Salesian cardinal stays incredibly energetic, and eagerly spoke about his work within the Hong Kong jail where the nice Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners are held. The wardens, it seems, behave decently with Zen, allow him to remain so long as he likes, and don’t (overtly) monitor his conversations with the prisoners. The cardinal told of constructing several converts within the prison and was asked what he used for catechetical materials. The answers were striking: the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in fact, but additionally Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

But perhaps probably the most remarkable moment of the evening got here when, after Cardinal Pell offered a moving toast to his brother cardinal, the conversation turned to those times when the Lord appears to be deaf to the pleas of his people — times not unlike what many Catholics experience today. Cardinal Zen reminded the group of the suitable verses of Psalm 44 (“Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord?/Awake! Don’t solid us off perpetually!”); remembered that those verses had been a part of the Introit for Sexagesima Sunday within the old Roman liturgical calendar — after which proceeded to chant, from memory and in impeccable Latin, that entire Introit (which might be heard here!)

Not unexpectedly, the conversation eventually touched on current Vatican China policy, of which Cardinal Zen has been a vocal and chronic critic. The difficulty, the Hong Kong prelate insisted, was the character of the Beijing regime, which lived in a special ethical universe, lied in negotiations, and will never be counted on to maintain agreements it made. This, in fact, was precisely what had turned the Vatican’s Ostpolitik in east central Europe within the Seventies right into a fiasco: the Vatican negotiators’ refusing to concede the totalitarian “regime factor” involved, and due to this fact negotiating with communist governments as in the event that they were run-of-the-mill authoritarians slightly than mortal enemies of biblical religion.

Confirmation of Cardinal Zen’s evaluation of the built-in perfidy of the Chinese communist regime got here at virtually the identical time as that dinner, when the British publisher Allen Lane releasedThe Hong Kong Diaries of Chris Patten, which the last British governor of the Crown Colony had kept from his arrival in 1992 until the British withdrawal in 1997.  The leading China policy mandarin within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in those days, Sir Percy Cradock, had told Patten that, while the Chinese leaders “could also be thuggish dictators,” they were also “men of their word and would stick by what that they had promised to do.” To which Chris Patten, strongly suspecting otherwise, replied “I hope that’s true.”

That brisk exchange raises a matter: Is Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, taking his cues from the late Percy Craddock? If that’s the case, Cardinal Parolin would higher serve the Church’s cause in China if he paid attention to the much more realistic Chris Patten (himself a Catholic), who noted in his diaries that “One in all the [Chinese negotiators’] more surreal tactics is to say no to elucidate what something means unless we provide a concession on our side. In other words, openness, accuracy and transparency are themselves thought to be Chinese concessions.”

Cradock and other profession British diplomats assumed that, as Chris Patten puts it, “you may have to go together with Beijing slightly than risk arguments.” That spinelessness was bad enough for Her Majesty’s Government within the mid-Nineties. It’s shameful for the Vatican today. And it ought to lift serious issues for many who imagine Cardinal Parolin as Pope Francis’s successor.