A new Human Rights Watch report documents a sharp worsening of China's crackdown on Catholics, describing arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture, and house arrest targeting priests and bishops. The repression falls hardest on underground Catholic communities — congregations that worship in secret rather than through the state-sanctioned Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church (a body established by the Communist Party in the 1950s to sever ties with Rome) — and HRW argues that a secretive 2018 Vatican-Beijing deal on bishop appointments has inadvertently facilitated this, leaving underground communities little choice but to join the state church or face elimination. The report calls directly on Pope Leo XIV to renegotiate the agreement and press Beijing to halt the persecution, warning that bans on children attending religious services are severing generational ties to the faith across an estimated 10–12 million Chinese Catholics.