The body of Pope Francis will be buried this Saturday in the Roman Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
At that point, his mortal remains will rest under the protection of an image of Mary with a high spiritual value for Catholicism, great symbolic power for the Jesuits — and for relations between the Catholic Church and Asia.
This is the Byzantine icon of the Virgin Salus Populi Romani, the saviour of the Roman people. It was the first representation of Mary officially authorised, by papal bull, to be disseminated and reproduced.
The icon of the Virgin of the Basilica of St Mary Major is also a symbol of Catholic attempts to evangelise Asia. In fact, it became the emblem of the epic of the great Jesuit journeys to the Far East, including China, and in 1602, Jesuit missionary and sinologist Matteo Ricci donated a copy of the icon to the Chinese Emperor.
The search for a new “passage to the East” for evangelisation has been one of the great axes of Pope Francis’ pontificate. Many observers even consider it the late pope’s core political mission.
A decentralised conclave
The eastward turn is manifest at this year’s conclave, where Asia will be better represented among the voting cardinals than ever. Some ecclesiastical observers have gone so far as to call the redistribution of voting power “revolutionary”.
Theologian Gianni Criveller, a missionary for decades in the Chinese world and editor of the digital newspaper Asia News, said this spells the end of a Eurocentric custom that assigned an overwhelming majority to cardinals from the Old Continent.
“Surprisingly enough, cities like Paris, Milan, and countries like Austria and Ireland will not have a cardinal in the conclave,” he explained. “Instead, we will have cardinals from Mongolia, where there are only about a thousand Catholics, from Myanmar, and another from Thailand, countries with a large Buddhist majority.”
For the first time, Asia will be represented by 23 cardinal electors out of 135. China will have one, Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-Yan of Hong Kong.
The proportion of Asian electors is large compared to the spread of Catholicism in that region. The only deeply Catholic country in the region is the Philippines, whose religiosity was inherited from its Spanish colonisers.
Of the almost 1.5 billion Catholics worldwide, Asia accounts for 10%, although they comprise little more than 3% of the continent’s population. Nevertheless, Asia is now at the forefront of human and economic development, and the Vatican cannot pretend it does not exist.
According to Pope Francis’ papal diplomacy, a Catholic presence in those no longer remote areas will soon be as essential as its traditional rootedness in Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
Another reason Asia was relevant in the late pope’s time is technology. Pope Francis was the first pontiff to address a summit of G7 economy ministers, appearing in Apulia in June 2024 to talk about artificial intelligence.
The Gospel, a passport to the world
Father Criveller said the ultimate aim of the geographical revolution of the College of Cardinal electors was “the spread of the Gospel”.
“It is not proselytism, but simply the transmission of Gospel knowledge to other cultures, exactly as the Jesuits did in the 17th century.”
The idea was for a pastoral mission to move the Catholic Church away from the West’s colonial history; to bring the world to Rome, and not vice versa. That vision was certainly informed by Pope Francis’ South American background.
But the evangelical mission is not everything.
According to Professor Silvia Menegazzi, founder of the Centre for Contemporary China Studies, “Pope Francis had a very precise vision of relations between states. A vision that has certainly always been much more in line with that of countries that we might call non-Western, that we might call the Global South.”
The Argentinian Pontiff made pastoral trips to the Middle East, South Korea, the Philippines, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Thailand, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Indonesia, East Timor and Singapore. Yet despite political efforts, he failed to visit the two Asian giants: India and China.
As things stand, the Vatican and Beijing have no formal diplomatic relationship. In fact, the Holy See recognises Taiwan as the Republic of China, one of the key reasons that Pope Francis failed to grace mainland China with a visit.
Beijing, however, has expressed condolences for Francis’ death, and is considering whether to send a “high-ranking government delegation” to his funeral.
Rapprochement with Beijing
Nevertheless, papal diplomacy achieved a major political breakthrough with Beijing in 2018, establishing the possibility of approving the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops by the communist regime.
Until then, the Chinese authorities unilaterally appointed local bishops, but as of 2018, the Vatican now approves the appointments, a change that could greatly boost the Catholic Church’s credibility in China and East Asia more widely.
But there have necessarily been tradeoffs.
“This agreement is certainly an exercise in Vatican realpolitik,” says Father Criveller. “As a quid pro quo, the pope has not been able to visit Catholics in Hong Kong, Macao and especially Taiwan. Nor has he ever intervened in detail on the issues of human and religious rights in China and the issue of Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists, or the military threats against Taiwan.”
According to official figures provided by the government in Beijing, there are about 10 million Catholics in China, but church sources say that that number includes only the faithful who belong to official religious institutions.
There are also unofficial Catholic organisations in China that the authorities do not recognise, comprising as many as 30 bishops out of every hundred, who are accepted by the Vatican as legitimate.
“Compared to predecessors, with Francis, relations between China and the Vatican have improved,” said Menegazzi, “but not as the Vatican expected. China remains by ancient tradition — not just by virtue of communism — the most atheistic country in the world.”
“We will see how the successor will set his Asian policy. Certainly the relationship with China was tied more to the person of Francis. So it will be necessary to evaluate how the new pontiff will look at China, rather than vice versa.”
Although the composition of the post-Francis conclave is partly linked to the late pope’s political and religious orientations, it is unclear how far the political conditions of the world and Europe will allow his successor to complete Pope Francis’ outreach to the east.
“Certainly the late pontiff attached great importance to politics and international relations,” said Father Criveller. “In contemporary times, the only pope we’ve had like him was John Paul II.”
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