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Welcome to the Inquiry.
I'm William Crawley.
Each week, one question, four expert witnesses, and an answer.
Somewhere inside the Vatican, there's a document that very few people have seen, and there's a corresponding copy in Beijing.
It's a text of a secret deal signed in 2018 called the Provisional Agreement between the Catholic Church and the People's Republic of China.
This historic agreement may determine the fate of China's 13 million Catholics, including the state approved church, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic association, and an underground church whose leaders see the deal as a sellout by their spiritual father, the Pope.
Within weeks, the Vatican will have to decide whether to extend that agreement with the Chinese Communist Party.
This week we're asking, is Pope Francis betraying China's Catholics?
Part 1 the Great Wall.
It was very easy for xi Jinping in 2018, with the power that he had accrued and also inherited, to negotiate with a Pope who likewise had that power.
An agreement in which some of the historical saws from the past could be set to one side.
And they basically have agreed that the Chinese Church should be Chinese and Catholic.
Martin Palmer is a theologian, a translator and an expert in the long and fractious history of China and the Catholic Church.
The end of the 13th century, a Franciscan monk, John of Monte Covino, was sent by the Pope to talk to the Mongolian horde in the hope that they would unite with the Crusaders in the Holy Land and destroy Islam.
He became the archbishop of Beijing in about 1306, founded a cathedral, converted many people, and then when the Chinese took power again, because the Mongolians were seen as an alien group, that was the end of the Church.
They were all expelled, the churches were destroyed.