The neo-Catholic, Fatima-revisionist establishment is constantly telling us that many members of the schismatic "Patriotic Catholic Association" in Red China are "secretly" in union with Rome, even as they openly maintain their adherence to a schismatic pseudo-church which condones forced abortion and whose constitution prohibits allegiance to the Pope.

         This, of course, is a lie. It is a new version of Catholic fidelity to go along with the new version of the Message of Fatima which this crowd is trying to foist upon the Church: a consecration of Russia without any mention of Russia, and a conversion of Russia without any conversion.

         Now obviously there cannot possibly be any such thing as "secret" loyalty to Rome on the part of those who consent to belong to a "church" founded by the devil himself ¾ for that is what the PCA is. It is a "church" founded by communists and controlled by communists, who hand-picked the PCA's bishops, all of whom were consecrated without a papal mandate; a church that endorses genocide in the womb. Whoever would belong to this "church" is betraying the Gospel.

         Early this year a sad development in China received very little notice in the press. On January 10, 2001, a true Catholic bishop in China died at the age of 92. As reported by RNS news service "Matthias Tuan In-min, the last Chinese prelate installed as a bishop before China's Communist regime forced the Roman Catholic Church underground, has died in Beijing. He was 92." Bishop Tuan was named a bishop by Pius XII on June 9, 1949, shortly before communist forces established the Republic of China. "The (Communist) regime outlawed religious observances, imprisoned many priests, nuns and laity and closed Catholic institutions."

         In 1957, the Red Chinese set up the PCA to replace the Catholic Church in China. Tuan was the last bishop regularly consecrated for the true Catholic Church. Bishop Tuan in turn consecrated his assistant, Bishop Coadjutor Joseph Hsu Zhihsuan, who will take over the "underground" diocese of faithful Catholics who worship in private, living in fear of arrest or imprisonment.

         So, as the apparatus of Cardinal Sodano prepares for a sell-out of Taiwan and the underground Catholic Church in China ¾ which, please God, will never actually come to pass ¾ Catholics should mourn the passing of Bishop Tuan, whose loyalty to Rome was never "secret," but open and courageous.

         Meanwhile, a question for the reader to ponder: Why does the neo-Catholic establishment speak of the "secret loyalty" of the members of the PCA, a church which condones abortion and rejects the papal primacy, while happily denouncing as "schismatics" any Catholic who so much as attends a chapel maintained by the Society of Saint Pius X in order to escape the liturgical three-ring circus at the local parish? Curious indeed. But such is the way of things in this, the "springtime of Vatican II."