Vatican City - The government-backed Catholic bishop of Shanghai says he hopes the Vatican and China can restore ties, but warns that reconciling believers from the official and underground churches won't be easy.
In an interview with the Italian religious affairs magazine 30 Days, Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian said members of China's official church were eagerly awaiting an upcoming letter from Pope Benedict XVI on the state of the Catholic church in China.
But members of the underground church were worried, he said.
"The underground faithful cannot help but have some concerns, or the fear of being repudiated," he said, according to the magazine.
China forced its Roman Catholics to cut ties with the Vatican in 1951, shortly after the officially atheist Communist Party took power. Worship is allowed only in government-controlled churches, which recognize the pope as a spiritual leader but appoint their own priests and bishops.
Millions of Chinese, however, belong to unofficial congregations loyal to Rome. Many unofficial congregations hold services openly, but in some regions they are routinely harassed and their priests and bishops arrested.
Benedict has been reaching out to Beijing, eager to bring China's estimated 12 million Catholics under Rome's wing. But the two sides have been at loggerheads over the Vatican's insistence on naming bishops.