Time ripe for improvement in Vatican-China relations, official says

Published: 2006-03-27

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The time is ripe for improvement in Vatican-China relations, said a top Vatican official. In interviews with a Hong Kong television station and local newspaper, South China Morning Post, the Vatican's foreign minister, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, said there was hope for an eventual normalization of relations between the two states. "The fact itself of (China) entering into unofficial contacts is an attitude not of closure but of openness," the archbishop told the Hong Kong-based newspaper. While official diplomatic ties have been severed since 1951, some sort of improvement may be on the horizon, he added. "The time is ripe," the archbishop said March 25 on a Hong Kong cable television program. "We hope for an opening on the part of the Chinese authorities, who cannot ignore the expectations of their people or the signs of the times."

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