John Allen in the Wall Street Journal today

The pope’s foremost concern is to defend the basic human rights of the estimated 13 million Catholics on the mainland. This isn’t a negligible issue. While antireligious persecution today is nowhere near as severe as in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution — when all religions were persecuted, not just Catholics — believers who don’t worship through state-approved organizations do so at their peril. The Cardinal Kung Foundation, an activist group, estimates that there are seven Catholic bishops in China currently in prison, 10 under house arrest and one in hiding — not to mention 23 priests either in jails or forced labor camps. To put this into perspective, official Chinese statistics put the total number of Catholic bishops in the country at 69, with some 5,000 priests, though perhaps as many as 40 "underground" bishops are not counted in those numbers.

Recognizing China’s official Catholic Church would heal the schism between official and unofficial worshipers on the mainland. In China, the split is government-created: Beijing exerts tight government control over the church through its "Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association," a Communist Party-controlled agency that vets clergy, church construction, public activities, and other aspects of religious life. But there’s also an unofficial, "underground" church, known as the "church of the catacombs," that recognizes the Vatican’s authority.

The Vatican abhors such formal ruptures in the church, which create the possibility of further division along the lines of the Protestant Reformation. So in China, the Vatican has quietly worked to heal the divisions. Today, there’s an informal understanding that the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association will not insist upon a bishop unacceptable to the Vatican, and the pope will recognize bishops that emerge from elections held under the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association’s aegis. On background, Vatican officials have told me and other reporters that more than three-quarters of the bishops in today’s "official" church have been recognized by the pope.

That understanding, however, remains dependent on the goodwill of those in power in Beijing. The Vatican believes that formal diplomatic relations, with a promise of religious freedom, would end the era of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association altogether, thus erasing the distinction between the official church and that of the catacombs. In so doing, the church in China would finally be unified, with the infrastructure and administrative capacity to absorb future growth. Beijing remains wary of such a move, conscious of what happened in Eastern Europe, where the Catholic Church bolstered opposition forces to the Communists and ultimately helped bring down the Soviet-backed regimes.