Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on September 26, 2026, 23:00

When Pius became Pope, he gave ear to arguments that the Confucian ceremonies in question were cultural and philosophical rather than religious in character. Pius soon came to be convinced by these arguments and reversed his predecessors’ decisions on the matter. For the next ten years the Church boomed in China. Unfortunately, this brief springtime of Chinese Catholicism is mostly forgotten today, due to Mao Zedong’s efforts to destroy China’s religious culture after he came to power in 1949.

https://wherepeteris.com/inculturation-and-syncretism/

So much for the last trad pope.