Pope Francis has betrayed Cardinal Zen

When Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old former Bishop of Hong Kong, was arrested by Chinese authorities on Wednesday and charged with ‘collusion with foreign forces’, the White House called for his immediate release. Lord Patten of Barnes, the last British governor of Hong Kong, said the arrest was ‘yet another outrageous example of how the Chinese Communist Party is hell-bent on turning Hong Kong into a police state.’ Human rights activists lined up to defend the cardinal, who although released on bail faces the prospect of spending his last years in a Chinese jail cell.

You might expect the loudest protest of all to come from the Vatican. Not so. In fact, it didn’t protest at all. It merely said: ‘The Holy See has learned with concern the news of the arrest of Cardinal Zen and is following the development of the situation with extreme attention.’

And even that raises the question: how much ‘concern’? In 2020, Cardinal Zen – a champion not just of democracy in Hong Kong but also of persecuted Catholics on the mainland – went to Rome to tell Pope Francis how worried he was about the Vatican’s 2018 pact with Beijing, which gives the Communist party the power to appoint Catholic bishops.