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Catholic cleric has attacked Pope Francis’s deal with China to jointly appoint Chinese bishops, warning: “You cannot strike deals with the Devil.”
In a new book listing complaints about Francis’s papacy, Gerhard Müller, a German cardinal, also compares the Vatican’s silence over Beijing’s crushing of human rights in Hong Kong to the failed appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. “It’s not right to stay silent — it is a grave error,” said Müller, 75, calling China “a rather brutal dictatorship”.
Francis’s deal with China, made in 2018, to jointly appoint bishops was aimed at ending years of tension between China’s unofficial, underground Catholic Church, which is loyal to Rome, and China’s state-controlled Catholic Church.