The Pope and the New Ostpolitik with Father Mario Portella | Danube Politics

In 1969, Willie Brandt became Chancellor of the German Federal Republic. 

A hulking man of immense charisma, he broke the stronghold of Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, and with it, set his country on a new path with regards to the Eastern Bloc. 

Brandt judged the old policy, Adenauer’s staunch anti-Communist Hallstein Doctrine, to have failed. 

In collaboration with his aide, Egon Bahr, he reset relations, through something called "Wandel durch Annäherung": Change through rapprochement. 

Eventually, this would come to be known as Ostpolitik. Later still, it would seep into broader Western culture as 1970s Detente, and lead to the signing of the historic Helsinki accords. 

Brandt’s policy was chiefly political, but it was twinned with a similar one from the Vatican, which also became known as Ostpolitik. 

In Rome, first Pope John XXIII, then Pope Paul VI decided that they would work with the Warsaw Pact authorities, to preserve what little the Church still had. 

The Vatican had three goals: 

• to reopen seminaries and churches where possible;

• to secure recognition for bishops;

• and, to allow limited Church activity under official regimes.

In return, the Holy See would tone down public condemnation of Communism. 

But much as with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, in the late 70s, with the advent of Pope John Paul II, everything changed. 

The Polish Pope used funds from Reagan to build up the underground church, and with it, the Solidarity movement in his home country. Eleven years later, Solidarity and the Church were to prove decisive in the overthrow of the Polish dictatorship, and the wider fall of the Iron Curtain. 

You might say both strategies played their part. The first establishing a base. The second, leveraging it.  

But which was better? Or indeed, more moral? To gain influence with –  or to resist totalitarianism?

It’s the horns of the dilemma the Church still faces, with regards to the world’s surviving Communist monolith – China. 

Since 2018, a secret agreement between Pope Francis and the CCP has governed the election of Chinese Bishops. Rome can veto - but it cannot propose. 

In return? Well, not much. The Church must still display pictures of Xi Jinping, pictures of Christ are deprecated, and young Catholics are barred from attending until their 18th birthday.

Father Mario Portella has been watching this new Concordat play out. He’s a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute. He’s also former Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence and Priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

In a new piece for the Hungarian Conservative magazine, he argues that, when it comes to Xi Jingping, it is better to resist than to play along. This week, he joins Gavin Haynes on Danube Politics, to make his case.