Pompeo, On Impromptu Visit to Rome, Warns Vatican on China Deal

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Responding to reports that the Vatican sent a delegation to Beijing to renew negotiations on the appointment of Catholic bishops, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a stern reminder during an impromptu visit here on Wednesday (Sept. 30) that faith leaders need to “exercise a moral witness against the persecution of believers.”

His comments, first published in an article and then repeated at the U.S. Embassy event, were met with pushback from church officials.

“Nowhere is religious freedom under assault as much as it is in China today,” Pompeo said at the symposium on “Advancing and Defending International Religious Freedom through Diplomacy,” organized by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See in Rome.

“As with all communist regimes, the Chinese Communist Party deems itself the ultimate moral authority. The increasingly repressive CCP, frightened by its own lack of democratic legitimacy, works day and night to snuff out the lamp of freedom, especially religious freedom, on a horrifying scale,” he said.

Pompeo quoted the pontiff’s call, in his 2013 exhortation “Evangelii gaudium,” for the church to be “permanently in a state of mission.”

“To be a church ‘permanently in a state of mission’ has many meanings,” said the American secretary of state. “Surely one of them is to be a church permanently in defense of basic human rights. A…