LifeSite News

(LifeSiteNews) — The government-approved Chinese Catholic bishops have backed the Communist Party’s limitation on public worship. EWTN reports that the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China (BCCC), sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), supported the government’s ban on “unregistered clergy” engaging in religious pastoral work or doing so in “unapproved sites for worship.” In a February 4 statement, the BCCC stated that “religious groups must comply with relevant laws and regulations when conducting religious activities.” Compliance with these rules is a matter of “national and public interest,” according to the bishops. The CCP introduced legislation limiting religious activities to “registered” religious venues by “certified and registered religious personnel.” Nina Shea, who directs the Center for Religious Freedom, called on Pope Leo XIV to summon the bishops from the BCCC to the Vatican for their support of the “suppression of Chinese Catholicism.” “That the heads of these entities are the bishops of Beijing and Shanghai, China’s most important dioceses, is shameful,” she said. “Pope Leo should immediately summon them to Rome to review their episcopal authority.” “Supporting the CCP ban on unregistered clergy and churches directly conflicts with Vatican policy,” Shea stressed. She said Leo “should disclose the content of the Holy See’s provisional agreement with China and review whether this new Chinese policy constitutes a breach of the agreement’s terms or even of its spirit.” The officially secret Vatican-China deal, signed in 2018 under Pope Francis, is believed to recognize the state-approved church in China and allows the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to appoint bishops. The Pope apparently maintains veto power, although in practice it is the CCP that has control. It also allegedly allows for the removal of legitimate bishops to be replaced by CCP-approved bishops. The deal was renewed most recently in 2024 for a four-year period. READ: China consecrates bishop approved by Pope Leo XIV under Vatican-China deal Shea referenced a 2007 letter from Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholic Church in China in which he said that the attempt by the CCP to impose its own structure on the Chinese Church was “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” She also cited the Vatican’s 2019 pastoral guidelines to members of the Chinese Catholic Church that affirmed that priests and bishops had the right to “individually follow one’s conscience on whether to refuse to take the pledge renouncing foreign influence, such as papal influence – a pledge required to register with the state’s Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and its bishops’ conference.” “This new position in support of banning and criminalizing those clergy who refuse to take the pledge renouncing papal authority lays bare these entities as mere party tools for communist control and suppression of Chinese Catholicism,” Shea warned.

ROME (LifeSiteNews) — A leading conservative member of the College of Cardinals castigated the introduction of new anti-life policies in the West, and laid out that a primary task of the “new evangelization” lies in countering the negative influence of contemporary ideologies and philosophies, in an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews in his Roman apartment. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, speaking in the wake of January’s extraordinary consistory, judged that “behind all this is atheism,” insisting that Westerners must recover the understanding that “God is the origin and aim and finis of our human existence.” Müller, prefect-emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, confirmed that he was troubled by recent developments in the West, in both its thinking and its policies. He lamented the political situations of Britain and Canada, where “today, you can be sent to prison if you are praying in favor of life.” “That belongs more to a dictatorship,” he added. “It has nothing to do with a modern democracy,” Müller insisted. “There is a falling back into authoritarianism.” READ: Chinese bishops side with communist regime to restrict worship, ban ‘unregistered clergy’ Müller thought these developments regrettable, since the Western world struggled against Stalinism and Hitlerism in the 20th century, but has not rid the “atheistic anthropology” that lay behind both totalitarianisms of left and right. These philosophies trace their fundamental error, Müller diagnosed, to the fact “they deny creation and the dignity of every man.” “We have all these bad traditions,” he said, “such as where Karl Marx defined human beings as only an ensemble, a mix of some social conditions. And Freudianism: only psychological conditions. Everywhere, behind all this, is atheism – the denying of the essence of every human being as a person in relation to his Creator, and to his Saviour, God.” Meanwhile, Catholic thinking saves us from such mistakes he noted, because “we can say ‘Our Father’ in our prayer, with a direct relation to God. With all respect to the next authority, in relation to God, and eventually to all.” “This is behind this anti-Christian wave,” Müller said, criticizing the arrest of anti-abortion campaigners praying silently in Britain. “A lot of politicians have lost the faith, a direct contact to their Christian roots. They see that this ideology is an instrument to have absolute power over the people, over their thinking. We are going toward an Orwellian world.” It was in this context, Müller said, “the cardinals wanted to talk about the ‘new evangelization.’” When asked about the liturgical issue, Müller acknowledged that the liturgy was discussed in brief and that it would be more substantively covered in June’s consistory. “Liturgy is a central element for the realization of the Church,” the cardinal explained, “but if the Church is not respected as an instrument for salvation in Jesus Christ – liturgy, for the atheist, is only a collection of some rites without deeper meaning or translation of grace and real contact with God. For them, liturgy is only a propaganda show of the Church.” “It is an absolute misunderstanding; a misinterpretation,” he acknowledged, revealing why in the context of evangelization it may feasibly be understood by some as not the first priority. “They [atheists] are not able to understand what the dimension of transcendence is because they are immanentists. In the end, they hate human existence because their first dogma and last dogma is that a single human being is not more than an animal.” “In former times, according to the old ‘illuminism,’ a human being [was] only machine, homo machina. Later, in Darwin’s time, humans were seen as not more than a higher-developed animal,” Müller stated, further criticizing the ideologies which work against the Church and man, which he wishes to see opposed. He reiterated: “But they don’t accept the essential difference between things and animals and us. Therefore, in the end, they hate themselves.” “And then you get elites,” he continued, not mentioning by name the Epstein scandal, “they want to be gods and they want to make definitions for themselves and the masses, the rest of mankind, and that is absolutely against our Christian understanding that God created everybody in his likeness and image.” READ: Cardinal Fernández tells SSPX superior that Vatican II documents ‘cannot be corrected’ As for the consistory itself, Müller remained positive but was not without some constructive criticisms. He found the “working groups are a little bit neutralizing” and that “free interventions” were “very, very short. So-called free interventions were not free but forced.” Müller hoped that the cardinals might help initiate a new evangelization which might resurrect the understanding that, “Before our historical existence, was the eternal providence of God, we existed in the Son – because we are created in the Son, in the Logos.” “Therefore, for our historical existence,” he explained, “we exist in the salvation plan of God.” “This is also the basis for the immortality of the soul. And for the resurrection of man, soul and body.” “We are part of this world,” Müller clarified, defending the need to be philosophically and politically engaged, “but most important is [the fact] that all is created for the human being for our salvation. God came to earth, as we confess in the Credo. God is the origin and aim and finis of our human existence, our thinking.”

Editor’s note: The following text is taken from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s X account, first published on February 12, 2026, and republished here in full. (LifeSiteNews) — I cannot but note with sorrow and indignation the statement released February 12 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, at the end of his meeting with Father Davide Pagliarani, Superior General of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X. After decades of humiliation, inconclusive dialogues, partial concessions revoked by Traditionis Custodes, deafening silences regarding doctrinal and liturgical deviations widespread throughout the Church, and even more serious doctrinal and moral errors promoted by the Supreme Throne, Rome now claims to make the suspension of the episcopal consecrations announced by the SSPX for next July 1 a preliminary condition for dialogue. These consecrations are not acts of rebellion, but a supreme act of fidelity to the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church, which has been deprived for almost 60 years of bishops who preach integral doctrine and administer the sacraments without any compromise with error. READ: Bishop of Charlotte orders pastors to play video about his ‘pastoral vision’ at all Sunday Masses The dicastery’s statement subtly repeats the same modernist scheme seen in 1988: it offers a “theological dialogue” on issues the Holy See has always refused to seriously address – religious freedom, destructive episcopal “collegiality,” pan-heretical ecumenism, the Nostra Aetate declaration that equates false religions with the one true faith, and the Abu Dhabi Document – while threatening “schism” for the only gesture that is able to guarantee the certainty of apostolic succession. But who wields “schism” as a weapon today? Who excommunicated the bishops consecrated in 1988 for defending Tradition and its beating heart, the Catholic Mass? Who excommunicated me and silenced me, while promoting declared heretics and covering up abuses of every kind? Who forced the faithful to submit to an authority that has renounced immutable Catholic doctrine in the name of a “new humanism” and a “synodality” that is nothing other than the cancer of democracy applied to the Catholic Church in order to destroy from within its divine hierarchical constitution and Petrine primacy? The true schism is not that of those who consecrate bishops to guard and transmit the Catholic faith in its entirety, but rather the schism of the conciliar and synodal hierarchy, which has denied apostolic Tradition, replacing sound doctrine with heretical ambiguities, true Catholic worship with a Protestantized liturgy, and legitimate authority with a totalitarian power exercised against the faithful who refuse to apostatize. The Society of Saint Pius X does not need the permission of those who have renounced the faith to do what Providence asks of it: namely, to perpetuate the episcopal line faithful to Tradition. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre acted not out of schism, but out of necessity – that same state of necessity that persists today, aggravated by the systematic persecution of the Traditional Mass and the imposition of false doctrines that contradict the perennial Magisterium. Therefore, with the clarity that the situation requires and with the responsibility that falls to those who have sworn to defend the faith even to the shedding of their blood: I urge the Society of Saint Pius X to categorically refuse to suspend the announced episcopal consecrations. They are non-negotiable: they are a sacred duty before God and souls; I urge the rejection of any “theological dialogue” that assumes that the Second Vatican Council is compatible with Tradition. The problem is not “interpreting” Vatican II, but recognizing that it introduced errors that undermine Catholic doctrine on essential points and jeopardize the salvation of souls; I declare that true ecclesial communion is not measured by canonical recognition by a hierarchy that has lost the faith, but by integral fidelity to Divine Revelation, to the two-thousand-year-old Magisterium, and to the Holy Sacraments transmitted without adulteration; I invite all Catholics of good will – clergy, religious, and faithful – to recognize that the state of necessity endures and that the salvation of souls requires pastors who do not compromise with error. I am certain that the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X will continue to pray for the conversion of unfaithful pastors and for the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And that it will not trade the truth for a recognition that would mean accepting error and betraying the legacy of its founder, the venerated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. + Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop Viterbo, February 12, 2026