For the first time in more than five years, an official Vatican delegation is visiting China and meeting with government officials. The visit is a sign that relations between the two are warming after being locked in conflict in recent months.
"This is a real gesture by the Vatican and its diplomats," said Reverend Bernardo Cervellera, director of AsiaNews, a Catholic missionary news service with close links to the Vatican, which first reported the meeting. "I think it is to keep the door open, to have a link."
The Vatican and China broke off formal diplomatic ties in 1951; both sides have at times in recent years expressed a general interest in re-establishing them.
Still, the relationship has going through a stormy period since April, when China's Patriotic Catholic Church appointed two bishops without first consulting the Vatican. The Vatican denounced the move as "an attack on religious freedom."
China had long insisted that its state-controlled Catholic Church had the right to appoint bishops. The Vatican insists that such power belongs solely to the pope. As a practical matter, in the past two years bishops have generally been appointed after informal discussions between the two sides.
The Vatican delegation now in Beijing consists of two relatively senior officials, Archbishop Claudio Celli and Monsignor Gianfranco Rota Graziosi. They arrived last Sunday and will remain until tomorrow, meeting with "mid-level" government officials, Cervellera said; they will not be meeting with officials from the Patriotic Church.
Neither the Vatican nor the Chinese government would confirm the meetings.
A papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said, "I have no comment to make."
But a church official who was involved in previous informal talks between the two sides over the last two years confirmed that the visit was occurring.
Relations between the Vatican and China reached a low point on Oct. 1, 2000, when Pope John Paul II proclaimed 120 Chinese as martyrs, on the very day that the Chinese Communist government was celebrating its 50th anniversary. The pope later wrote a letter apologizing for the coincidence of timing, which he said was not intentional.
During the last years of John Paul II's papacy, which ended with his death last April, the Vatican and China engaged in a series of informal exploratory meetings in Rome and Beijing, largely conducted through surrogates. Leaders of Catholic aid groups like the Community of Sant'Egidio met with representatives of Chinese government research and policy organizations.
Months before he died, John Paul II himself met with one of these Chinese delegations.
China has said that before full diplomatic relations can be restored, the Vatican must sever its ties with Taiwan. Vatican officials have indicated that they are prepared to do so if the two sides can agree on the issue of ordaining bishops.
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