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Mao Zedong instituted Communism in China in 1949. On February 21, 1951, the Central People’s Government promulgated the “People’s Republic of China (PRC) Regulations on Punishing Counter-Revolutionaries.” Included in a multitude of punishable activities is the following: “Any collusion with imperialism…”^[2]

This was a coded reference to papal Rome, courtesy of Chairman Mao who repeatedly accused the Vatican of imperialism. The PRC’s penalty for “Any collusion with imperialism” was life imprisonment or execution. Since there was no specific definition of “collusion”, criminality was in the eye of the beholder. If the eyes belonged to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), even the slightest acts of fealty towards Rome could be (mis)interpreted as sinister collusion and land a Catholic in jail at best, or cost his life at worst.

Take the case of Jimmy Lai, a Chinese-born businessman who since 1995 ran a newspaper out of Hong Kong called Apple Daily. In recent years Lai and other journalists wrote editorials advocating democracy and criticizing the “Chinese regime.” In 2021 Lai, a seventy-eight year old Roman Catholic, was arrested, tried, and convicted of – wait for it - “conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign countries.”

In this case Lai was not colluding with the Vatican. He did, however, have influential friends and networks outside of Hong Kong. It was enough of a pretext for the three judge panel to sentence Lai to 20 years of solitary confinement in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison.

Lai will not be allowed the Holy Eucharist while in prison. His family is very concerned for his health, given his advanced age, and medical conditions of diabetes and high blood pressure. It is likely Lai was given a death sentence, just like so many other Catholics who languished and eventually died in prison, a punishment that rarely fit the “crime,” but served the Communist government’s goal of stifling dissent. The CCP’s Chef’s Kiss came when it froze Apple Daily’s assets, forcing it to close on June 24, 2021.

For being such a small percentage (less than five percent) of the population, Chinese Catholics were a very unlikely threat to anyone. Their status as prime targets of the PRC’s anti-imperialist watchdogs was overrated., causing sociologist C.K. Yang to observe: “The only organized religion by which the Chinese communist regime feels threatened is Christianity, and more particularly the Catholic Church, because of its links with Western powers.”^[3]

Those “Western powers” created an 8 country armada to stop the persecution of their missionaries in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The armada invaded China, humiliated the Qing dynasty, financially bankrupted Chinese rulers, and ended China’s tradition of dynasty (until Mao, anyway).

Yet there was another reason the PRC and the CCP (and any other communist acronym you can hide an atheist under) feared the Church. It was because the Roman Catholic Church embodied fearless truth. Communist China was a lie from the beginning, built on the fundamental falsehood of atheistic materialism. The simple fact God exists refutes Communism. Consequently, religion is repellent to them: they break out in hives, then attack.

Between Catholicism and Communism, only one can survive. The Church preceded Communism in China, and the Church will outlive Chinese Communism just as it outlived perhaps the largest mass murderer in human history: Chairman Mao Zedong.

The Great Leap Forward

Chairman Mao was fond of initiatives. He didn’t seem to notice that most of the programs he started during his twenty seven year rule failed. The Great Leap Forward was an ill conceived disaster that caused tens of millions of Chinese to starve to death.

In 1958 China was one of the poorest countries in the world. It had a massive rural population that relied primarily on wheat for food energy. Mao’s brainstorm was to mobilize China’s immense population to thoroughly transform the nation’s agriculture and industry in a way most countries took decades to accomplish.

Mao sought to emulate Stalin’s economic reliance on heavy industry by focusing Chinese manpower on steel production. He left out the part where the Russian government subsidized the manufacturing of steel until a profit was realized. Mao took tens of millions of peasants used to working on farms, and instead made them:

“Cut trees for charcoal, mine deposits of iron ore and limestone, build clay furnaces, and smelt metal. This frenzied enterprise did not produce steel but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools.”^[4]

Peasants good at gathering wheat proved deficient in creating urban industry – at least not without extensive training, which was not provided. In turn, their farms were populated by “agricultural communes” who likewise received little training. Consequently, the communes didn’t plant enough new grain to feed China’s vast population. Worse, the communes enforced another Mao program: the Sparrow Elimination campaign.

Since sparrows eat wheat, Mao thought eliminating them would increase China’s annual wheat production. Millions of sparrows were killed to further Mao’s vision. Too late was it discovered that sparrows also eat lots of locusts. In the bird’s absence locusts multiplied excessively and ravaged China’s grain worse than the sparrows had.

By the spring of 1959 there was famine in a third of China’s provinces. The disaster was hidden for a time behind fabricated reports of record wheat growth, proving - to Mao at least - that his agricultural commune idea was a stroke of genius.

In fact, the numbers were inflated by subordinates afraid of punishment for telling the truth: communes didn’t plant enough wheat, and what they planted was devoured by locusts freed from the wrath of sparrows. Consequently, China continued to export wheat, leaving peasants to eat grass.

Instead of a great leap forward, Mao’s awful ideas and their inept implementation created a great famine.

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Much was written about the startling interviews given by Pope Francis during his long pontificate and much more could be said about them. Yet, rather than dwelling on the myriad of troubling details, I want to examine a core philosophical belief which undergirds much of what Pope Francis said, and presumably believed. It has long been my contention that the grave crisis in the Church, the crisis of Modernism, is not so much that utterly false principles are urged upon the faithful but rather the due order and priority among true principles is disregarded and in fact inverted. When the Modernist crisis is evaluated from the hindsight of history, I believe it will show that one can do much more harm than a Luther or Calvin who simply established false principles, by advocating an erroneous priority of true principles. In this article we will consider how the inversion of the proper order of true principles concerning the end of Man leads to disaster.

To demonstrate the need for priority of true principles we can begin by resolving an apparent paradox in two editions of the Baltimore Catechism. There are two answers to the question “why did God make us?” One is that “God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.” (Baltimore Catechism 1941 edition). The second is “God made us to know, Him, to love Him, and to serve Him.” (Baltimore Catechism 1921 edition). Both of these statements are true but to be fully and properly understood they must be placed in a proper order. To understand this order we can turn to the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Aristotle argued that all Men act with an end or purpose in mind. There are, however, different kinds of ends, intermediate and ultimate. An intermediate end is an end, a completion of action, but one which is not done for its own sake but for the sake of another end. An ultimate end is an end sought simply for its own sake. The question “for what sake is that end achieved?” has no meaning with respect to the ultimate end. A simple analogy can help illustrate the point. If I am cooking food, my end is to prepare dinner. Yet, I am not preparing dinner for its own sake. I am preparing it for the end of eating it. The fact that I can ask why I am eating the dinner (to avoid starvation and death) proves that eating dinner is itself an intermediate end.

Returning to the Catechism, Man is created for the end of knowing, loving and serving God in this life to be happy in the next. Yet, this is not the ultimate end of Man. This is only his end because he was created in the first place. Thus, we can ask why did God create Man having such a particular end? The answer to this question is the other answer to the Catechism question. God created Man (including the creation of the end of knowing, loving, and serving Him) so to show forth his goodness and share his happiness. This is the ultimate end of Man; the reason for which the end of knowing, loving and serving God exists. As St. Thomas explains “God produced the being of all things, not by natural necessity, but by his intellect and will. His intellect and will can have nothing for an ultimate end other than His own goodness, which He communicates to things. Things participate in Divine goodness through similitude, insofar as they are themselves good. But what is best in created things is the good of the order of the universe, which is the most perfect, as the Philosopher says (XII Metaphysics, c. 10); this is also in accordance with Holy Scriptures, where it is said: And God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. (Gen. I, 31), whereas of the works of creation taken separately He had simply said that they were good. Consequently, the good of the order of things created by God is also the principal object of the will and intention of God. But to govern a being is none other than to impose an order upon it.... That which makes the particular end of each Man to know, love and serve God to be good is that this particular end is ordered to the manifestation of God’s goodness through the created universe. There is an important principle that lies behind this ordering of ends. The ultimate end is understood from God’s perspective. It is a cosmological end; an order and purpose to the universe. The intermediate end is from Man’s perspective. It is an end of each person’s individual existence. Yet, this individual personal end must be subject to the ultimate end of manifestation of God’s goodness (and especially his charity in desiring to share His happiness). The personal end of each Man is a part of the overall end common to all creation. We maintain this necessary order only by understanding the end of each person in its dependent relation to the end of God’s creation.

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Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith official, Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu, was filmed placing coca leaves in an offering to Pachamama at a Church gathering in Cusco, Peru, an event Vatican News promoted as preparation for Pope Leo XIV's visit to the country.
Sources:
https://infovaticana.com/en/2026/08/18/a-doctrine-of-the-faith-official-places-coca-in-a-payment-to-the-earth-jordi-bertomeu-as-offerer-in-a-ceremony-to-pachamama/

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the controversy with Medjugorje and Bishop Eckman’s shutdown of the TLM in Pittsburgh.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the controversy surrounding Pope Leo’s change to Vatican City law and some comments from the Belgian bishops on married priests.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the latest desecrations in France and the US along with a religious shutdown in Europe.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the latest crisis in the Ceuta and a change to the Vatican City State

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the latest defacing of Medjugorje and two remarks from prelates on the TLM.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus and Michael Haynes break down the latest interview from Cardinal Roche suggesting Pope Leo will not return to the TLM.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the latest controversy from China and a German Bishop’s comments on a pride celebration tragedy.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the controversy surrounding non-Catholic religions becoming involved with the Synod and is joined by Michael Haynes to discuss Pope Leo's return from vacation

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the Transalpine Redemptorists and the latest moves in Rome.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the controversy with Cardinal Reinhard Marx and the German priests in his diocese and the latest discourse surrounding homosexual men in the priesthood.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at the latest statements from the German bishops and is joined by Michael Haynes for an update on the Rupnik story

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By the early second century, however, Greco-Roman writers began to notice the existence of the new sect. We start to get passing references in works like Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars or the Annals of Tacitus. What did early Romans think of Christianity? How did they situate it within what they knew of the religious landscape of the Mediterranean in the second century AD?

The earliest Roman comments on the Church are revealing. Roman knowledge of Christianity at this time was certainly superficial, yet beneath the misunderstandings lay a surprisingly accurate grasp of several essential aspects of Christian life. Historian of early Christian Robert Louis Wilken explains it thus:

These first [Roman] comments, though perfunctory and indifferent, and often based on hearsay, are significant, for they give us clues as to how Christianity was perceived at the time it was first coming into public view…Appearances, it is sometimes said, are deceiving. Knowledge based on what one sees and hears is thought to be superficial, for what one see and hears is never the sum of things. Yet is it not equally true that how something appears, how it is perceived by others, is an aspect of what it is?^[1]

When Pliny the Younger wrote his famous letter to Emperor Trajan about Christianity in Bithynia in the year 112, Pliny tells the emperor that he had ordered the Christian community to cease gathering because “in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations.”^[2] The phrase “political associations” is hetaeria, which means something like “club,” “association,” or “brotherhood.” The hetaeria was not an unusual institution in ancient Rome. They were fraternal associations organized around the trades and generally under the patronage of a certain god. Most members were drawn from the artisan classes and contributed to a common purse out of which they provided fraternal benefits to members. In this sense, they were not unlike the later medieval trade guilds.

These fraternal associations were not intrinsically political. For example, Pliny uses the word hetaeria to describe a fireman’s association in Nicomedia.^[3] They nevertheless retained the potential to become political under the right conditions (students of latter Roman history will recall that politicized charioteering clubs almost brought down Emperor Justinian in the Nika riots of 532). Trajan feared the factionalism and unrest such organizations could foment and therefore banned any political organization. The empire thus allowed the hetaeria to carry on their business so long as they confined themselves to fraternal activities and kept far away from politics.

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Pliny believed the Christians were some sort of new hetaeria that had become dangerously subversive to the political order. But why did Pliny make this connection? What was it about Christianity, as he understood it, that led Pliny to consider the Church as a kind of fraternal association? To answer that, we need to learn a bit more about the benefits that membership in a hetaeria conferred.

One of the most common services provided by the hetaeria was the burial and commemoration of deceased members. The statutes of an association from Lanuvium during the reign of Hadrian show that it was “licensed” by the Roman Senate with the following decree:

These are permitted to assemble, convene, and maintain a society; those who desire to make monthly contributions for funerals may assemble in such a society, but they may not assemble in such a society except once a month for the sake of making contributions to provide for the burial of the dead.^[4]

This Lanuvium decree was carved on a column, which also contains by-laws for the association, explaining the obligation of members to contribute funds for the maintenance of the society, details for arranging the burial of members, and other procedural matters. One of the chief activities of the association was hosting commemorative banquets in honor of the deceased, the silicernium, held at the graveside on the day of burial; additional dinners were held on a fixed calendar throughout the year on important days. For example:

Aug 13: Birthday of the goddess Diana and founding of the society
Nov 27: Birthday of Antinous (deified companion of Emperor Hadrian)
Dec. 14: Birthday of Caesennia (the club’s wealthy patron)

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at a contradiction from Mayor Zohran and the controversy surrounding the Church in China.

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A report from the reliably-sourced Messa in Latino (MIL) attested that Rupnik might soon be acquitted at the conclusion of the Vatican trial into him. “We have learned from persistent and highly credible sources that the criminal trial currently underway in the Vatican against Father Marko Ivan Rupnik has reportedly concluded with a favorable outcome for him,” MIL wrote.

So great has been the suspicion of maneuvers made to enable Rupnik to evade any legal scrutiny, that MIL commented they believed that their sources had leaked the information “to ensure that the Vatican can’t cover it up.”

For Pelican readers happily unfamiliar with the Rupnik saga a brief recap is first necessary. The highly influential priest and co-founder of the Loyola Community has been based in Rome for some decades, operating out of his Aletti Center, which is the operational base for the infamous mosaics he produces.

His controversial work has been installed in nearly every major shrine throughout the world, and given pride of place inside the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. He personally gave an image to Pope Francis who displayed it in his office, visible during videos recorded by Vatican News.

But it is the alleged abuse which has placed Rupnik into the Catholic media world since December 2022, when news broke – heavily led by MIL – of serial abuse reportedly committed by the priest.

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On this episode of the Pelican Brief Daily, Murray Rundus looks at yet another canonist who says that the SSPX's confessions are valid and is joined by Michael Haynes for the latest on Father Rupnik.

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