ROME – Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the former bishop of Hong Kong, has become seen in recent years as something of a Confessor — one who has suffered but not (yet) died for the Faith.
He has had well-documented difficulties with China’s Communist authorities, which have seen him in recent years charged under new security laws and held under house arrest, as well as his well-known struggles with the Vatican over their <em>Ostpolitik </em>approach to Beijing.
Now he has felt forced to speak out in defence of the Faith in the face of the Synod on Synodality. He joined four other cardinals in signing two sets of <em>dubia </em>that were sent to Pope Francis, seeking clarification on points of doctrine ahead of the meeting. Although a standard practice for gaining doctrinal clarity, under this papacy the <em>dubia</em> have been widely read as questioning the orthodoxy of the Pope rather than the nature of orthodoxy.
In response to these issues, Cardinal Zen generously agreed to answer several questions for the<em> Catholic Herald. </em>Asked about his views on the Synod now underway, the cardinal lamented: “We don’t have much news,” and recalled several “problems of procedure” which he raised in his recent letter to cardinals and bishops participating in the October synod assembly, including the continued reference to “conversation in the spirit” as if it were some “magical formula.”
“Perhaps a cup of coffee or small glass of something ‘spiritual’ and some cookies might help even more the ‘conversation in the spirit’” at the small group round tables, Cardinal Zen quipped.
His Eminence sees the constitution and the procedure of the Synod as reflective of a confused and confusing set of misunderstandings of the nature of the episcopate and the Church herself. “The bishops [taking part in the Synod] represent only ten percent of the world episcopate. How can such a small proportion achieve the original purpose of the Synod, as Pope Paul VI established it, that is, as a means of facilitating episcopal collegiality?”
Cardinal Zen criticized the Synod Secretariat’s endeavour to make personal experience the starting and reference point of the “conversations in the Spirit” rather than divine revelation, as well as an apparent suspension of the bishops’ teaching office during the October assembly.
The 91-year-old cardinal said wryly: “Please find somebody to explain, in a way that we poor mortals may understand: What does it mean ‘to discuss not ideas but experiences?’ So, the long tradition of ‘see and judge’ should be changed to ‘see and do not judge.’ But Jesus told the Apostles to ‘teach’!”
The cardinal continued: “If discernment is meant to help the Pope and the bishops to ‘teach’, and the teaching is surely done through ideas, shouldn’t the ‘conversations in the Spirit’ necessarily bring us back to Jesus himself, who said that the Spirit will ‘take from what He has taught to the Apostles’?”
“The animators of the Synod seem to reduce the Word of God to the feeling of the people—by which they mean all the baptized, even those who left the Church long ago—and refer to the magisterium, not of the past twenty centuries, not of the many recent popes, but only of the reigning pontiff.”
Cardinal Zen’s observations strikingly resemble the contrast made by Pius X between the Modernist and the Catholic conceptions of faith itself: “Faith is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source. By this assent, because of the authority of the supremely truthful God, we believe to be true that which has been revealed and attested to by a personal God, our Creator and Lord.”
Two bishops from mainland China are attending the synod—they are newly regularized bishops and so legitimate participants. Asked about their presence during the October assembly, Cardinal Zen said: “They are all chosen by the Pope from the bishops recognized by the Pope as legitimate. But they are all from the bishops obedient to the government, not from those real pastors of the people—in both the official and underground Churches—who now are even more persecuted than before the secret agreement.”
Asked what the next steps should be regarding the <em>dubia</em>, Cardinal Zen said: “You cannot force the Pope to answer. But at least I have just tried to explain to the faithful why we found that the responses to the original <em>dubia</em> have not dispelled our<em> </em>concerns.” He was referring to a statement posted on his blog on 12 October, in which he criticized various points of imprecision in Pope Francis’s response to the first <em>dubia, </em>and notably called the Holy Father’s guidance on same-sex blessings as “pastorally untenable.”
