A 'Single' Church

Melinda Liu and Duncan Hewitt in Newsweek on far ostpolitik and Vatican approval of the choice of an auxiliary by Bishop Aloysius Jin of the government-sanctioned "patriotic church."

The Vatican's relationship with Jin is a clever move. It helps bring Shanghai's patriotic church into the Roman Catholic fold. (Jin claims that 90 percent of Shanghai Catholics belong to the patriotic church, while only 10 percent remain underground.) And for Jin, it appears to validate his decision to work within the patriotic church—even though he's believed to have quietly received Vatican validation sometime in recent years. "Ten years ago, there were still people saying we shouldn't open seminaries, we should wait for the fall of communism," he recalls. "If I'd listened to their advice, there would now be only six old priests like me in Shanghai." Instead, the Shanghai diocese has 62 young priests, and its seminaries have trained 350 priests who work throughout China, he says.