China Attacks Pope Francis

 

The Chinese government has faulted Pope Francis over a passage in his new book in which he mentions the suffering of China’s Uighur Muslim minority group, saying his remarks have “no factual basis at all”.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily news briefing in Beijing on Tuesday that “People of all ethnic groups enjoy the full rights of survival, development, and freedom of religious belief.” But Zhao made no mention of the camps in which more than a million Uighurs and members of other Chinese Muslim minority groups are reported to be held.

Other governments, human rights groups and The United States, says the prison-like facilities are intended to separate Muslims from their religious and cultural heritage, forcing them to declare loyalty to China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.

China, after initially denying the existence of the facilities, says they are centres intended to provide job training and prevent “terrorism” and religious “extremism” – on a voluntary basis.

In his new book, Let Us Dream, due on December 1, Pope Francis listed the “poor Uighurs” among examples of groups persecuted for their faith.

The Pontiff wrote about the need to see the world from the peripheries and the margins of society, “to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude”.

“I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi – what ISIS (ISIL) did to them was truly cruel – or Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that went off while they prayed in church,” Francis writes in his book.

However, the Pope has declined to call out China for its crackdown on religious minorities, including Catholics, much to the dismay of the Trump administration and human rights groups.

Recall that China and the Vatican have had no formal relations since the Communist Party cut ties and arrested Catholic clerics soon after seizing power in 1949.

The Vatican last month renewed its controversial agreement with Beijing on nominating Catholic bishops, and Francis has been careful to not say or do anything to offend the Chinese government on the subject.