Sino–Vatican Relations at the Century's Turn

In this article we discuss Sino–Vatican relations which have not evolved from dispute into rapprochement. Changes in the international political landscape have added new complications to old questions. The course of this relationship has not been smooth due to the ideological questions. The Chinese Communist Party and the Vatican have been struggling for teaching authority over 12 million Chinese Catholics over the last few decades. The fundamental difficulty rests in the ideological incompatibility between the dialectic materialism embedded in Marxism Leninism and religious idealism.