Pope aims to rebuild Asia ties

HAEMI, South Korea -- Pope Francis made his strongest gesture yet to reach out to China on Sunday, saying he wants to improve relations and insisting that the Catholic Church isn't going in as a "conqueror" but is rather a partner in dialogue.

Francis outlined his priorities for the Catholic Church in Asia during a meeting of about 80 of the region's bishops, urging them to engage with people of different cultures empathetically.

"In this spirit of openness to others, I earnestly hope that those countries of your continent with whom the Holy See does not yet enjoy a full relationship may not hesitate to further a dialogue for the benefit of all," he said.

Then deviating from his text, he added: "I'm not talking here only about a political dialogue, but about a fraternal dialogue. These Christians aren't coming as conquerors, they aren't trying to take away our identity." He said the important thing was to "walk together."

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope's remarks were "obviously a sign of goodwill for dialogue" with China as well as the other countries in Asia with which the Vatican doesn't have diplomatic relations: North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Bhutan and Brunei.

He acknowledged that Francis has so far refrained from making any outwardly political statement about China, which counts about 12 million Catholics, but that the speech was a clear affirmation of a desire for dialogue.

China cut relations with the Vatican in 1951, after the Communist Party took power and set up its own church outside the pope's authority. China persecuted the church for years until restoring a degree of religious freedom and freeing imprisoned priests in the late 1970s. More recently, the Vatican under then-Pope Benedict XVI sought to improve ties by seeking to unify the state-sanctioned church with the underground church still loyal to Rome.

Vatican-China ties have already broken new ground on Francis' first Asian trip, with Beijing agreeing to let Francis' Alitalia charter fly through its airspace. When St. John Paul II last went to South Korea in 1989, Beijing refused to let him fly overhead.

For the Vatican, the main stumbling block in relations remains the insistence of the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association on naming bishops without papal consent. For China, the naming of bishops is a matter of its national sovereignty, and it also objects that the Holy See has diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Lombardi sought to stress that the Vatican was always open to dialogue and was not interested in questions of political sovereignty.

There was no immediate response Sunday from Beijing authorities -- either from the government or the Patriotic Association. But the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hua Chunying, told the government's China Daily that "China has always been sincere in improving relations with the Vatican and has been making positive efforts for that." The comments don't appear on the government website, however.

In the final event of his trip, Francis celebrated a Mass of reconciliation today in Seoul.

The service also was attended by South Korean President Park Geun-hye, as well as some North Korean defectors.

In a poignant moment at the start of the Mass, Francis bent down and greeted seven women, many sitting in wheelchairs, who were used as sexual slaves by the Japanese military during World War II. One gave him a pin of a butterfly -- a symbol of the plight of the "comfort women" -- which he immediately pinned to his vestments and wore throughout the Mass.

Historians estimate that 20,000 to 200,000 women from across Asia, many of them Koreans, were forced into Japan's military brothel system during the war.

Information for this article was contributed by Gillian Wong and Jung-yoon Choi of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/18/2014

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