Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo is considered a confidant of Pope Francis. He is also highly controversial after claiming China is “implementing the social doctrine” of the Catholic Church.
In a broad-based interview with the Spanish-language edition of the Vatican Insider, the chancellor of the influential Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in Rome, praised the world’s second-largest economy, calling it “extraordinary.”
“Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” Bishop Sanchez Sorondo said in remarks reprinted in the Catholic Herald.
“You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs,” the 75-year-old senior Vatican official added.
Yet a report released by the National Narcotics Control Commission last year showed that the number of drug addicts in China was on the rise.
Data confirmed that there were about 2.51 million drug users in the country of 1.37 billion by the end of 2016, an increase of 6.8% compared to the previous year. Up to 22,000 addicts were under 18, and more than 1.37 million were aged from 18 to 35, the report stated in the state-owned Xinhua News Agency.
Drug addiction
“What air, one wonders, did the bishop breathe in China, one of the most heavily polluted countries in the world?” wrote George Weigel, a senior fellow at Washington think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in the conservative magazine the National Review.
While government figures show that drug addiction is small, compared to the country’s vast population, it is still a problem.
The single largest source of illicit substances was Myanmar. More than 92% of heroin and 95% of methamphetamine seized by Chinese authorities were traced back to the Southeast Asian nation.
“For sure, geographic proximity to Myanmar is a major factor,” Su Xiaobo, an associate professor who researches the narcotics trade between Myanmar and China at the University of Oregon, told Sixth Tone, an online website specializing in contemporary China.
A report by The Brookings Institution in Washington produced similar numbers. It also stressed that more should be done to help addicts.
“China faces a growing problem of illicit drug use,” the report compiled by Sheldon X. Zhang, of San Diego State University, and Ko-lin Chan, of Rutgers University, stated in the executive summary. “Drug addiction is considered personal failure and addicts are highly stigmatized.
“Drug addiction does not receive much public sympathy or priority in government funding,” the report added.
Bishop Sanchez Sorondo’s knowledge of China’s housing problem also appears to be limited, judging by Beijing’s plan to dismantle 15 million shantytown homes from 2018 to 2020.
Premier Li Keqiang outlined the program after a cabinet meeting last year when a blueprint was unveiled to provide affordable homes for the poor. “The revamp not only improves people’s livelihood but also helps with investment, consumption and inventory de-stocking,” a statement from the cabinet said.
Beijing had already pledged to tear down 18 million slums from 2015 to 2017, the cabinet statement added.
China’s record on religious freedom is another explosive topic. Last year, the State Council or cabinet tightened regulations, intensifying a crackdown on unsanctioned activities and increasing its supervision of certain groups.
‘Physically abused’
The policy was announced just weeks after the US State Department released a report stating that China “physically abused, detained, arrested, tortured, sentenced to prison, or harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups.”
“China is an officially atheistic state, according to the Chinese Communist Party, and religious persecution is a staple of the regime’s repressive apparatus,” Weigel, who holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, went on to say in the National Review.
“[Bishop] Sanchez [Sorondo’s] statements inevitably implicate the Pope he serves and cast doubt not only on the prudence of the Vatican’s current attempts at a demarche with the PRC but on the integrity of the Holy See. Those are the facts,” he added
“To try to square them with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church requires something approaching a psychotic detachment from reality — or, worse, a willful ignorance, turning a blind eye to repression and persecution in order to indulge fantasies of a socialist paradise freed from the unpleasantness of bourgeois liberal society.”
Still, Bishop Sanchez Sorondo told the Vatican Insider that he found a “positive national conscience” when he visited China as part of diplomatic efforts by Rome over the Catholic Church’s position in the country and the appointment of bishops.
“What I found was an extraordinary China,” he said. “What people don’t realize is that the central value in China is work, work, work. There’s no other way, fundamentally it is like St Paul said: ‘He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat’. [There is a] positive national conscience.”
But is that the “conscience” of the Catholic Church?
The Church on a fact finding mission finds that there is religious freedom in China and plenty of Christians everywhere in every city. The society embrace social cohesiveness and ills like drugs and pornography are banned.
"“What air, one wonders, did the bishop breathe in China, one of the most heavily polluted countries in the world?" The National Review has no moral, ethical, or social standing to be heard in the matter of social policy as it is simply the propaganda wing of vulture capitalism. The ‘evidence’ of capitalism’s ‘limited success’ in reducing poverty, comes primarily, indeed almost exclusively, from continents [N. and S. America and Australia] that taken from their original possessors, who were ‘ethnically-cleansed’, exterminated, "genocided" if you will, and worked with slave labor until relatively recently. Since the end of ‘legal’ slavery the working classes have been ‘serfed’ in them and the capitalist countries occupying the stolen continents have warred on each other and the rest of the planet until the present day to drain resources from the economically colonized at gunpoint. China’s exploitation isn’t at gunpoint … yet. All net poverty reduction in the world has come in China. Only the USG and NATO countries systematically bomb other countries. The Vatican spokesman, in context, isn’t incorrect in his assessment. While the National Review opposes women’s rights, minority rights, workers rights and supports economic predation on the weak.
BIG DEVELOPMENT.
This is huge. The Catholic Church has always been one of the political pillars of imperialism, and now that support will soon be gone. You know it is big when NATIONAL REVIEW has its knickers in knots. Sorry, couldn’t resist. You have to know what NR is about.
NR was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley. Its basic purpose is to develop a Catholic intellectual patina to imperialism. They are going nuts over there now. Good.
European towns and cities are full of beggars – local and migrants – and drug addicts. I was all over China (Beijing, Tianjin, Kaifeng, Xian, Chongqin, Kunming) in 2013 and 2014, and remember only one beggar, in Beijing, and still he was not really begging but peddling baked potatoes… In private, conversations were rather free to comment or criticize. Of those two, what type of society should be a model for the rest of the world ?
I know people in China who attend a historic foreign-built church that was renovated by the local city government. Christians and Buddhists both seem to practice their religion freely. Individuals and organizations working to overthrow the state are proscribed. But the common impression that China suppresses religion in general is simply false.
At last, some religious man says "white is white".
Unfortunately, that upset the politicians.
Nobody’s perfect, but China is more perfect than most other countries right now, given her suffering in the past two hundred years, her ability to rejuvenate and develop this vast country of multiple ethnicities and maintain peace and development. It’s an inspirational story attracting more and more countries to respect and follow!
Religious freedom is important, but those freedom can easily be abused in the wrong hands. Countless atrocities and genocides have been carried out in the name of their religion, the world would be better of without most religions! People have above average intelligence have long abandoned such superstition and made the world better, religions are for the idiots and, YES, they do need to be controlled or else they will follow blindly the monsters in their teaching!
Peter Chan,
As you said, anyone with an average intelligence would not need religion. Then the other half of humanity still needs it.
Religions without politicians are beautiful. And however obsolete some of their ideas are, humanity is not intelligent enough to get rid of them at this point of its evolution. Not to mention that many religious ideas do bring harmony to societies.
So I agreed with you that humanity needs to be aware of religions being utilized and abused by politicians.
I think the bishop better goes back to the altar that where he belongs stop puting more salt in the wound of the millions of victims of the communist.
2.51mil drug users in a country of 1.37bil is less than 0.2% of the population. It’s a problem, but not that pressing yet. One would think the opioid crisis in their own backyard is something Americans and Canadians ought to concerned with. Eradication of poverty too has mostly been achieved in China, while the ranks of America’s poor continue to grow. Then again, though they may not have enough to eat, they have democracy and liberty, so that’s that. End of story.