Pope Benedict XVI met Thursday with the founder of a Catholic lay organization that has been facilitating diplomatic contacts with China -- including helping to arrange a secret meeting in April between the Vatican and a government delegation, officials said.
The Rome-based Community of Sant'Egidio has been working behind the scenes to help the Vatican and China improve relations that were severed in 1951, meeting with officials from the Chinese Cabinet's Development Research Center, said Community spokesman Mario Marazziti.
Xuefeng Yu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy to Italy, confirmed that a Chinese Foreign Ministry official met with the Vatican's foreign minister, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, on April 26, two days after Benedict was formally installed as pope.
The meeting marked the first known high-level contact between the two sides since the recent diplomatic push began, although Sant'Egidio did bring a lower-level Chinese delegation to visit Pope John Paul II in August 2004, community founder Andrea Riccardi disclosed recently. In an article in the Italian foreign affairs magazine Limes, Riccardi said that during the visit, one of the Chinese delegates told the pope: "We await you in China." John Paul reportedly responded: "God willing, may I be able to go to China."
"I think that in a year, the trip would have been possible, and I hope that Benedict XVI could realize the hopes of his predecessor," Riccardi wrote.
China forced its Roman Catholics to cut ties with the Vatican in 1951, shortly after the officially atheist Communist Party took power. Worship is allowed only in government-controlled churches, which recognize the pope as a spiritual leader but appoint their own priests and bishops.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema