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Pope to meet with Chinese officials to improve relations

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.
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