Yesterday afternoon Gerald O’Connell wrote at America, the Jesuit website and magazine, that “the Holy See and China are scheduled to sign an agreement in Beijing on the nomination of bishops sometime before the end of September.” That was his lede, an unqualified statement that corroborates a report in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. The report in the Journal was based on two sources. As far as I can tell, O’Connell’s report is based on a single source. It may turn out to be true, but so far no word from the Vatican.

The agreement will be narrow, O’Connell wrote, and concern only the process for appointing bishops: The Chinese government will select them, and the Vatican can veto them, or not. If Rome vetoed a bishop and Beijing nominated another, could Rome veto that one too? And the next one? We might never know. “The text of the agreement will not be made public, even after the signing,” according to O’Connell.

An impasse between Rome and Beijing would be unlikely in any case, at least under the current pontificate. When the two parties were reported to be putting the finishing touches on an agreement earlier this year, a sticking point involved four bishops in two dioceses on China’s southeast coast between Taiwan and Hong Kong. Each diocese was headed by two competing bishops, one approved by Rome but not by Beijing; the other, vice versa. In both instances Vatican envoys went to the bishop in communion with Rome and asked him to step down in favor of the one who had been appointed by the Chinese government against the wishes of the pope. One of the pretenders, Joseph Huang Bingzhang, was excommunicated in 2011.

The Vatican’s submission to the Chinese government in those pivotal cases raises the question whether Rome would ever exercise any veto that, on paper, it had been granted over Beijing’s selection of bishops. In the context of how negotiations have proceeded so far, veto power sounds like a polite fiction, a fig leaf with which the Vatican, having negotiated from a position of weakness, could cover its embarrassment. The Chinese call it “saving face.”