Latest: Vatican Admits China Deal Flaws But Vows to Keep Talking to Beijing

Nineteen bishops have been ordained under an agreement whose full text has never been published. On Tuesday 27 October 2026, in Rome, the Vatican's foreign minister said out loud what critics have said for years: the deal has flaws, and the flaws are evident. Then he said the Vatican will keep talking anyway.

Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See's Secretary for Relations with States, told journalists in Rome that the imperfections of the 2018 Vatican-China agreement on bishop appointments are evident, but there is a commitment to persevere in dialogue. His words, as reported, were careful, and they were also unusually blunt for a diplomat speaking about a deal his own institution signed.

The imperfections of the agreement are evident, but there is a commitment to persevere in dialogue.

Gallagher also said the dialogue with Beijing is not easy. That sentence, reported from the same briefing, does the quiet work in this story. It concedes difficulty without conceding failure, and it frames the Vatican's position as persistence in a hard conversation, rather than satisfaction with how the conversation has gone.

The agreement, reached in 2018, concerns the appointment of bishops on the mainland of China. It has never been published in full. It was renewed in 2020 and 2022, and then again in 2024 for a four-year term running through October 2028.

Eight years after it was first signed, the public still cannot read the document that governs how bishops are chosen for the world's most populous country, and that secrecy is itself part of why the deal draws such strong feeling on both sides.

Vatican China Agreement: All Chinese Bishops Now in Communion With the Pope

Gallagher pointed to a result the Holy See regards as decisive: all Chinese bishops are now in communion with the pope. That, as reported, is the improvement he set against the fractured situation that existed before the provisional accord.

The most recent sign of the mechanism at work came on 15 October 2026, when Fr Ignatius Ding Zuyao was ordained bishop of Haimen with papal approval. He was the 19th bishop selected under the deal, as reported. Nineteen appointments, each one through a process the public cannot read in full, and each one presented by the Vatican as a step toward a Church in China that is whole rather than divided.

Gallagher said Pope Leo XIV has continued the policy inhereted from Pope Francis, approving episcopal appointments through the agreed mechanism, with no announced modifications to the pact. Continuity, in that sentence, is the point. A new pontificate has not meant a new policy, and the appointments have continued on the same terms, through the same mechanism, since the 2024 renewal.

Cardinal Joseph Zen Criticism: Named Critics Reject the China Pact

Not everyone in the Church accepts Gallagher's argument, and the coverage of his remarks says so plainly. Cardinal Joseph Zen continues to reject the pact, a point noted in the reporting of the briefing.

Zen's criticism is his own, and this article attributes it to him as a named critic. It is not presented here as Gallagher's view, and it should not be read as the Vatican's view, because the Vatican's stated view, through Gallagher, is the opposite: persevere in dialogue.

The criticism matters because it comes from inside the Church, from a cardinal who has lived the pressures on Catholics in China and Hong Kong. It keeps alive the question Gallagher's remarks did not settle: if the flaws are evident, how much flaw can a deal carry before dialogue stops being patience and starts being surrender?

The reporting does not record Gallagher answering that question in those terms, and this article does not invent an answer for him.

Gallagher also said the Vatican is not willing to pay the price currently demanded for a permanent presence in Beijing, while the idea of some form of cultural presence has been studied. That is a limit, stated plainly, on how far dialogue will go, and a reminder that perserverance has its boundaries.

Readers following the Church in China can find the wider context in China Church Crackdown 2026: House Church Preacher Freed After 15-Day Detention, and in China Church Crackdown 2026: Pastor and Seven Christians Detained in Beijing Raid.

The pressure on unregistered churches is also set out in Breaking: China Church Crackdown 2026 — Pastor An Yankui Arrested as Campaign Reaches Christian Students, and the Vatican's wider diplomacy appears in Pope Leo XIV Says There Is No Such Thing as a Holy War at Assisi Peace Meeting.

What Gallagher offered on 27 October was not a defence of a perfect deal, and not a promise to abandon a flawed one. It was a holding position, stated in public: the flaws are evident, the dialogue is not easy, and the talking will continue through to October 2028.

China Vatican Deal Through October 2028: Dialogue Goes On Despite Evident Flaws

The next test of that holding position will be the next bishop appointed through the mechanism, and the next renewal decision, when the 2024 term ends. Until then, the deal remains what it has been since 2018: unpublished in full, renewed three times, defended by the Vatican as the path to communion, and rejected by named critics inside the Church who do not believe the price is worth paying.

Will the dialogue Gallagher vowed to persevere in produce, by October 2028, a Church in China that both Rome and its critics can recognise as whole, or will the evident flaws he named on 27 October be the words that define the deal when its term finally runs out?

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.