“Is the Pope Catholic?” is something people often used to ask when they wanted to reject someone else’s ridiculous rhetorical question. Today, though, the Pope’s identity as a Catholic may not be so absolute. Pope Francis hasn’t been in the mainstream press much lately, but he caused quite a stir in early February of this year when, according to the Wall Street Journal, he “decided to accept the legitimacy of seven Catholic bishops appointed by the Chinese government, a concession that the Holy See hopes will lead Beijing to recognize his authority as head of the Catholic Church in China.”
Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong, however, calls the Pope’s plan a “betrayal to Chinese Catholics who have refused to recognize the authority of government-backed church organizations and faced persecution for their participation in ‘underground’ communities loyal to the pope.”
When Pope Benedict XVI elevated then-Hong Kong Bishop Zen to the College of Cardinals in 2006. the new Cardinal was optimistic: “I had been one of the very first to plead with the Vatican on behalf of the aboveground church,” he wrote on his blog in February 2012. By then, however, he concluded, “The atheist government absolutely did not change its policy of total control of religion.”
Today, the Vatican has a different view, taking a more global perspective. Thus, in an interview with the Italian daily La Stampa last month, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin declared that “repairing ties with Beijing would help all Catholics in China to be in communion with each other and the pope.” Vatican Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, brought even more focus on the Social Justice aspects of the papal initiative, affirming that “China was implementing Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ better than many other countries and praised it for defending the Paris Climate Accord. ‘In that, it is assuming a moral leadership that others have abandoned’, he added.”
Here’s how the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal has reacted: “Some suspect that this Vatican accommodation is about paving the way for…a historic deal normalizing relations between Rome and Beijing. If so the damage will carry an even higher price, because it is difficult to imagine such a rapprochement without the Vatican’s first agreeing to break relations with Taiwan and abandon its Catholics there. The history of China shows it is adept at exploiting foreigners too eager for a deal.”
The Editorial Board then concludes with a pontifical warning of its own: “Perhaps someone ought to remind the Vatican that the Lord’s advice was to ‘render unto Caesar,’ not surrender to Caesar.”
There’s nothing really new here, though. American Thinker readers may recall the Jan. 31, 2016 article, “Pope Francis: Killing Us Softly,” which concluded with a reference to the Vatican’s cozy relationships with both Castro in Cuba and Rouhani in Iran.
All of which brings us to yet another giant leap of journalistic guesswork about what’s happening on the global social justice front—to wit, an April 28, 2018 Wall Street Journal feature essay titled “China’s Challenge to Democracy.” Written by a professor of politics at Cambridge University named David Runciman, the essay is adapted from the professor’s new book titled How Democracy Ends. The professor sums up the core concept of his book in a single sentence: “Results plus respect is a formidable political mix.”
In other words, the author claims that China is rapidly catching up with Western democracy—or anyway with the Western democracy called India. “Since the 1980s,” Runciman avers, “China has made strikingly greater progress in reducing poverty and increasing life expectancy than democratic India….There has been a simultaneous drive for greater dignity for the Chinese people.” These two sweeping generalizations constitute the ‘results’and ‘respect’ the professor cites as evidence of China’s challenge to democracy.
But Runciman quickly loses the Western democracy context when he introduces a Chinese definition of dignity that has nothing to do with the individual citizen’s self-respect: “It is a collective national dignity and it comes in the form of demanding greater respect for China itself. Make China great again! The self-assertion of the nation, not the individual, is what completes the other half of the pragmatic authoritarian package.”
The professor really takes his argument completely out of any coherent or accurate historical context, however, when he asserts that “Western democracy is now confronted by a form of authoritarianism that is far more pragmatic than its communist predecessors. A new generation of autocrats, most notably in China, have sought to learn the lessons of the 20th century just like everyone else. They too are in the business of trying to offer results plus respect. It is the familiar package, only now it comes in a nondemocratic form.”
In other words, Runciman seems to be trying to tell us that the prosperity (results) and individual dignity (self-respect) made possible through free enterprise and individual liberty are also possible under authoritarian forms of government like those in Hitler’s Germany or Xi Jimping’s China. This kind of doublespeak always happens when newspaper editors give progressives enough copy space to hang themselves.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the professor got himself into even more difficulty when, several paragraphs later in his essay, he took off on President Trump: “Mr. Trump’s electoral pitch in 2016 came straight out of the pragmatic authoritarian playbook. He promised to deliver collective dignity, at least for the majority group of white Americans: What Mr. Trump did not offer was much by way of personal dignity: not in his own conduct, not in his treatment of the people around him, and not in his contemptuous attitude toward the basic democratic values of tolerance and respect.”
Nor was it surprising that the letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal one week later were universally critical of Professor Runciman’s screed. Kimberley Moore of Bay Village, Ohio, for instance, wrote, “Prof. Runciman has gone way out on a twiggy limb to claim great Chinese ‘progress.’…Xi Jimping’s advancement to lifetime rule is the type of last gasp seen only among the most fragile power structures.” Paul Wessel of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, also observed that, “Mr. Runciman seems to believe that material prosperity is an independent variable, separable from individual freedom and self-respect….Prof. Runciman repeats the absurd left-wing trope that President Trump is an authoritarian. Mr. Trump has decreased the power of the bureaucracy…both income and employment have been increasing since his election.”
Enough said.

Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.

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