The Turning of the Tide - The Pope, the Cardinal and the Consistory that changed the Direction of the Church.
Cardinal Zen was given three minutes to change history.
Cardinal Zen’s role during the recent consistory should, in principle, have been hidden by the confidentiality intended to preserve privacy. The fact that his three-minute speech was leaked and published is itself a sign of the effect and leverage it must have had within the consistory. I want to explore why that is, and why I believe it is the harbinger of real change and hope under our new pope.
Not all of my readers will know the role that this extraordinary 93-year-old cardinal has played over the decades, but particularly over the last few years. So let me provide a brief biography. Before doing so, however, we need to remind ourselves of the wider context—the cycle of hope and despair the Church has been enduring in recent years.
Truth v. Relativism
The broader struggle in which the Catholic Church is engaged is its claim to represent objective truth against relativism.
We claim to defend the sanctity of the human person against the tyranny of collectivism on the Left.
We claim to defend free speech against censorship, because the Church is committed both to Truth—and to those who speak it—and to human dignity, the value of human beings as truth-tellers. For this reason, the Church has always been committed to freedom of speech.
As we know, we are facing a deepening crisis in which relativism, collectivism, and censorship press in from all sides.
It is not an act of tribalism or partisanship to say that only the Catholic Church is fighting this battle on all fronts—and that only the Catholic Church has the intellectual, moral, and spiritual resources capable of winning and defending the human heart.
This Substack has made that claim since its beginning and continues to articulate and argue for it. Cardinal Zen exemplifies precisely this witness, which is why I want to draw attention to what he has achieved this week.
But first, a brief biography for those who may not know what an inspirational priest and bishop he has been.
Cardinal Zen: A Brief History
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun is a Chinese Catholic bishop, Salesian priest, philosopher, and moral witness whose life has been shaped by exile and persecution. He has been a courageous, unyielding voice in some of the most politically dangerous circumstances imaginable, always insisting that truth must never be bartered for political convenience or comfort.
He is 93.
Born in Shanghai in 1932, Zen fled with his family to Hong Kong after the Communist victory in China. He entered the Salesians, studied philosophy and theology in China and Italy, and was ordained in 1961.
His early academic work was in philosophy, and he has always demonstrated a sharp intellect marked by clarity and precision. His integrity, intelligence, and courage have made him a formidable servant of the Church.
He was appointed Bishop of Hong Kong in 2002 and created a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.
Zen quickly became the Church’s most prominent defender of religious freedom in China. He emerged as a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s control over the Church, particularly through the state-run Patriotic Catholic Association, which demands loyalty to the Party over communion with Rome.
Where others spoke the language of “dialogue” and “gradual progress,” Zen represented the language of conscience. He warned repeatedly that accommodation without truth would lead not to evangelisation but to betrayal—especially of China’s underground Catholics, many of whom had suffered imprisonment, labour camps, and martyrdom for fidelity to Rome.
After his retirement in 2009, Zen’s voice only sharpened. He became the most vocal critic of the Vatican–China agreement, arguing that it sacrificed the suffering faithful for the illusion of diplomatic success.
In Hong Kong, he stood publicly with pro-democracy demonstrators, insisting that the Church must never confuse prudence with silence, or realism with surrender.
Now in his nineties, his slight stature hiding his formidable moral authority, Cardinal Zen occupies a role rare in modern ecclesial life: a bishop who reminds the Church that compromise with falsehood corrodes the soul, and that obedience is only Christian when ordered to truth.
Arrest, Surveillance, and Constraint
Zen was arrested in May 2022 by Hong Kong’s National Security Police over his involvement with the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, a charity supporting people affected by the 2019 pro-democracy protests. His passport was confiscated, and although the main conviction was for a minor administrative offence, he continues to live under legal constraint.
For several years after his arrest, he required special court permission to travel. In 2025 he was temporarily granted his passport to attend Pope Francis’ funeral in Rome, before returning to Hong Kong.
As a retired cardinal, he lives there as a private citizen under bail conditions, with ongoing legal sensitivities and constant surveillance.
The Vatican–China Agreement
In September 2018, the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China signed a Provisional Agreement on the appointment of Catholic bishops. It has never been made public.
Under its terms, state-controlled Church bodies propose episcopal candidates, while the Pope retains formal authority to approve or veto them. Several bishops previously appointed without papal mandate were recognised, in the hope of healing division and securing a stable future.
Cardinal Zen sharply criticised the agreement, warning that it subordinated the Church to an atheistic state and betrayed the underground Catholics who had endured persecution in fidelity to Rome. He argued that the agreement replaced martyrial witness with administrative accommodation, mistaking diplomatic access for genuine religious freedom.
He was ignored.
IGNORED BY THE POPE
In January 2020, at the age of 88, Zen travelled to Rome and formally requested an audience with Pope Francis in order to warn him personally that the underground Church was being abandoned. Pope Francis declined to receive him.
Instead, Zen was briefly seen by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the chief architect of the China policy Zen was opposing. Zen later made public that he had been refused a papal audience—not as a personal grievance, but as a symbolic repudiation of the message he carried. He did not conceal the pain or gravity of what he believed had happened.
Many Catholics found the refusal profoundly troubling. The agreement itself remained secret, renewed without transparent assessment, and shielded from theological scrutiny.
The offence was deepened when Pope Francis instead received Cardinal Battista Re, who publicly praised the China policy in a consistory address, marginalising dissent and defending the bureaucratic machinery of accommodation over the witness of the suffering faithful.
A Declaration of Interest
Some readers will know that in the early 1980s I undertook clandestine missions smuggling Catholic texts into Czechoslovakia for underground seminarians. The Marxist government had outlawed ordinations in an attempt to starve the Church of priests. Formation had to be secret, or the Church would die.
I met underground Church leaders in Prague under conditions of extreme risk. None of us knew each other’s real names. I was myself interrogated. I know something of the courage and cost of Catholic witness under Marxist totalitarianism.
The dynamics in China today are not dissimilar. I remain deeply suspicious of the 2018 agreement, and I have long held a profound admiration for Cardinal Zen.
Have the Claims Held?
The agreement was justified on three grounds:
Healing the split between “official” and “underground” Catholics
Protecting the Church by cooperation rather than confrontation
Securing a more normal episcopal life over time
These claims are now testable.
Since 2018 there has been no persuasive evidence that the policy has protected Catholics or softened the regime. On the contrary, repression has intensified, episcopal freedom has not materialised, and Rome’s prophetic voice has grown muted. The underground Church has been morally disarmed and exposed.
Cardinal Zen has been proved right.
The Consistory and the Turning Tide
Cardinal Zen’s return to Pope Leo’s first consistory was therefore of serious significance. He came reminding the Vatican that nothing he had warned about has been disproved—and that the legacy of Pope Francis must be held to account.
Although he said nothing about China, he delivered a devastating critique of the Bergoglian implementation of synodality.
What followed was an excoriating analysis of a process that bypassed bishops, politicised consultation, and substituted managerial control for episcopal discernment.
When Pope Leo announced that he intended to draw the cardinals together in an exercise of synodality, many of those who were critical of the Synodal process were overcome with anxiety. They assumed there was only one expression of synodality. But of course, in reality it refers simply to the process of consultation.
And Pope Leo did two things that were wholly different from his predecessor. Firstly, unlike Pope Francis he actually consulted. Francis talked about the Synodal process and implemented a highly politicised version of it extending it way past the office of bishops, but in fact he seldom if ever consulted the cardinals.
One of Pope Leo’s first public acts was to draw the cardinals together in this consistory, and then to ask them, - to consult them, on what synodality ought to consist of.
It is greatly to Pope Leo’s credit that Cardinal Zen was given the opportunity to address both the pope and his fellow cardinals.
His words were leaked because not only because they resonated and because of their profound analytical significance.
Cardinal Zen’s Speech
What follows is a summary, with direct quotations, of Cardinal Zen’s intervention at the consistory, as reported on 9 January by The College of Cardinals Report based on sources present at the closed-door meeting.
The bishop emeritus criticised Pope Francis for bypassing the College of Bishops in the synodal processes he implemented. He questioned Francis’ assumption that the process he initiated was an appropriate means for “understanding the hierarchical ministry.”
The cardinal refuted the assumption that any pope had the ability to “listen to the entire People of God.” In fact, he questioned whether, or to what extent, the laity themselves actually represented the People of God. He asked whether the bishops elected to take part in the synodal process had in fact been in a position to carry out a work of any real discernment.
Cardinal Zen clearly thought not. His speech was an excoriating indictment of the synodal process.
He made a series of accusations:
“The ironclad manipulation of the process is an insult to the dignity of the bishops, and the continual reference to the Holy Spirit is ridiculous and almost blasphemous.”
“They expect surprises from the Holy Spirit. What surprises? That he should repudiate what he inspired in the Church’s two-thousand-year tradition?”
