On his way to South Korea, Pope Francis will get a rare opportunity to directly address China’s leadership as he flies over the country, whose communist government does not allow Catholics to recognise his authority.
The Pope, who left Rome yesterday, always sends telegrams to the leaders of countries as he passes through their airspace.
The routine messages rarely make news, but this time there is keen expectation for what the Pope will say to China.
The fact that he is being allowed to cross Chinese airspace at all – Pope John Paul II had to skirt it in his tours of Asia – is seen as a positive, if small, step forward, in the often-fraught relations between the Vatican and China.
“This is a sign of detente, for sure,” said Father Bernardo Cevellera, head of the Rome-based AsiaNews agency and a specialist in the Catholic Church in China.
“But the real miracle would be if (Chinese President) Xi Jinping responds with his own telegram, and what he says.”
The Vatican has had no formal relations with China since shortly after the Communist party took power in 1949.
The Catholic Church in China is divided into two communities: an “official” Church known as the Patriotic Association answerable to the party, and an underground Church that swears allegiance only to the Pope in Rome. The most contentious issue between them is which side gets to name bishops.
The Vatican has been sending olive branches to China for decades, but a major stumbling block is the Holy See’s continued recognition of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.
The two Koreas have been divided since the Korean war, which left millions of families separated.
The South and the reclusive, communist North have been at a near-constant standoff since the 1953 armistice.
During the Argentine Pope’s six-day trip to South Korea he will hold a Mass for Peace and Reconciliation in the Myeong-dong cathedral in Seoul, the capital.
Officials of the Catholic Church in South Korea, which accounts for about 10 per cent of the population of 50 million, said they had asked the North to send a delegation to a papal Mass, but the North said they could not “for various reasons”.
A United Nations report earlier this year cited estimates that between 200,000 and 400,000 of North Korea’s 24 million people are Christians. The number is impossible to verify because most Christians cannot worship openly.
The visit, whose main purpose is for him to preside at a gathering of Asian Catholic youth, is Francis’s third global trip since his election in March 2013 and the first by a pontiff to Asia since 1999.