Few are the appointments of bishops that arouse so much interest. In China, each of them is scrutinized and commented on by the rest of the Catholic world, being seen as the sign of warming or on the contrary of a cooling of relations between Beijing and the Vatican. The one that has just taken place in the diocese of Fuzhou, a provincial capital on the south-eastern coast of China, facing Taiwan, is all the more important since it is the first that the new Pope Leon XIV approves, elected May 8.
Wednesday, June 11, the Vatican announced that it had appointed six days earlier, on June 5, an auxiliary bishop in this city of 9 million inhabitants. At the same time, the official Church, led by the Chinese Communist Party, organized, the same Wednesday, a ceremony to recognize in turn the appointment. Two gestures of reciprocal good will in an often tense context. China is the only country where bishops are appointed jointly by the local authorities and the Vatican, under an agreement signed in 2018 to appease tensions between the two states and put an end to the system of two parallel churches, one called “official”, the other “underground”. Elsewhere, it is an exclusive prerogative of the Holy See.
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Source: Lemonde