The career of Michael Fu Tieshan, Bishop of Beijing, chairman of the state-approved Catholic Patriotic Association, and thus the most senior churchman in China’s officially sanctioned Catholic hierarchy, encapsulated the tragedy of the Chinese Church. As a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, he occupied a senior position within a nondemocratic, avowedly materialist state, from where he rendered unto Caesar far more than was either necessary or, in the minds of many Catholics, proper for a churchman.

One pro-Vatican source said that Fu was “disliked and shunned by the faithful of his diocese for having continuously taken sides against the Pope, the Vatican and the people of China”.

China’s leaders and official media took a different view. Bishop Fu was given a state leader-level funeral in Beijing. He was perhaps the first Catholic to be granted such an honour since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. President Hu Jintao, party general-secretary, Wu Bangguo, chairman of parliament, and Zeng Qinghong, vice-president and a key power broker, all attended a secular ceremony at the Babaoshan cemetery for revolutionaries outside Beijing.

A formal statement described Fu as a “distinguished patriotic religiousleader, a well-known social activist and a close friend of the Chinese Communist Party”.

In many parts of the world (and for many in China) this would be regarded as an unwelcome encomium for a senior churchman. Yet it reflected the mixture of national sentiment, fear, oppression and power of patronage that fuelled the long-standing determination of the Chinese authorities to create a national Catholic Church – one free of formal institutional links with Rome of the kind that would provide Chinese citizens with a “foreign”, higher form of loyalty than that emanating from the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) in Beijing.

Fifty years after the formation of the CPA, the attempt to indigenise episcopal power has been only a partial success. China’s Catholics are divided between those who accept the officially approved hierarchy, which honours the Pope but rejects his authority over Church appointments and other matters, and an underground Church which remains loyal to the Vatican and whose adherents are often subjected to persecution.

In practice, the distinction between the two wings of the Church is often blurred, particularly at the local level. The situation is better described as a continuum in which many state-appointed bishops have benefited from prior (or subsequent) secret endorsement from the Vatican, usually after a degree of consultation with Beijing. Yet this informal reconciliation mechanism frequently breaks down. Last year the CPA ordained several bishops without consulting Rome, dashing hopes that a reconciliation was at last within sight.

It is hard to know whether Bishop Fu, in his role as chairman of the CPA, approved of these steps. He was by then elderly and ill, and much of the day-to-day running of the association had fallen to his deputy, Liu Bainian. His attitude to the appointments is therefore one of the many secrets of a life presumably often made unbearable by the conflicting demands of the Communist Party and the precepts of his faith that Fu has taken to his grave.

In his public life Fu gave no hostages to fortune. The very opposite of a turbulent priest, he was unconditionally loyal to the regime that appointed him bishop of his country’s capital and promoted him to senior positions in the political hierarchy.

He was born in 1931 in the Qingyuan district of Hebei province, one of the country’s Catholic strongholds. He entered a seminary at 10 and was ordained priest when 25. It was a time of upheaval in the Church as the Communist Party sought to break the power of the Vatican-appointed hierarchy and build loyalty around the newly created CPA.

Little is known of Fu’s attitude towards these developments. He worked as a priest in Beijing and taught foreign languages until Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 when, along with much else, organised religious life came to a standstill.

Mao’s death in 1976 and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping marked the start of better times. In 1979 Fu was trumpeted as the first “self-elected, self-ordained” bishop for 20 years. The terminology reflected the fact that the appointment was made by Chinese Catholics rather than the Vatican. It also meant the Vatican did not recognise him as bishop – a situation that persisted for the rest of his life and probably contributed to the stand-off between the Holy See and China’s (in Beijing’s view) most senior churchman.

Fu was able to use his close connections with the Government to help to restore diocesan life in Beijing after the destruction of the Mao years. The Church regained much of the property that had been seized by the Government.

Yet his relationship with the faithful often seems to have been distant, perhaps mirroring that in China between a senior secular official (which Fu also was) and the people he was supposed to serve and represent. The coolness also had something to do with Fu’s always coming out in strong support of the Communist Party on the most sensitive issues of the day, many of which had a bearing on the beliefs and aspirations of Christians. This was apparent in his swift backing for the Government’s use of tanks and troops in 1989 to crush the student-led Tiananmen Square democracy movement, and his fierce condemnation of the Falun Gong religious cult, thousands of whose adherents were arrested and persecuted by the Government.

He later took Beijing’s side against his own, criticising Pope John Paul II’s decision in 2000 to canonise 120 Chinese martyrs because they included “imperialists”, and attacking Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong because of his opposition to a controversial Bill that would restrict political activity in the territory.

Arguments that Fu was forced to make such remarks strain credibility. They also raise essentially unanswerable questions about whether cleaving to the party’s line was the only (or best way) the Bishop of Beijing could serve the wider interests of his Church.

Fu’s death leaves open the question of whether Beijing will informally consult the Vatican about the choice of successor as Bishop of Beijing. The issue is particularly salient given that Pope Benedict XVI is known to be preparing a letter about the future of China’s divided Church. While many of the faithful will be encouraged to believe that these developments point to another opportunity for reconciliation, experience suggests otherwise.

The Right Rev Michael Fu Tieshan, Bishop of Beijing, was born in November 1931. He died on April 20, 2007, aged 75