BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday expressed condolences over the death of Pope Francis, but said it had no information to share on who might attend the funeral.
China and the Vatican have in recent years maintained constructive contact and carried out beneficial exchanges, ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told a regular news briefing in Beijing.
China is willing to work with the Vatican to continue to improve bilateral relations, Guo said.
The two countries in October last year extended for four years a landmark 2018 agreement on the appointment of Catholic bishops in China.
The renewal suggested improving ties between Beijing and the Vatican despite tension over Taiwan, the democratically-governed island China claims as its own and with which the Vatican has formal diplomatic relations.
On Tuesday, Guo said the agreement for appointing bishops has been “implemented smoothly”.
Conservative Catholics have criticised the deal, which has never been publicly released, as handing too much control to China’s ruling communist party. The Vatican says the accord resolved a decades-long split between an underground church loyal to the Vatican and the state-supervised Catholic Patriotic Association.
Guo said he had no information to provide when asked about whether China would send any representatives to attend Francis’ funeral, which is scheduled for Saturday.
The Vatican estimates about 5 million of China’s 1.4 billion people are Catholic.
Taiwan has yet to announce who it is sending to the funeral, though Taiwanese presidents have attended some major Vatican events in recent years, including Francis’ inaugural mass in 2013.
Speaking in Taipei earlier on Tuesday, Taiwan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hsiao Kuang-wei said the ministry will “continue to push for senior government” participation at the funeral given the “profound” friendship between Taiwan and the Vatican.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista in Beijing and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Writing by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Kate Mayberry)
