The Vatican has agreed to Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun’s request to step down from his post in 2009:
[The Cardinal] said he would spend more time monitoring Catholic churches in mainland China, according to The Associated Press, which quoted him as saying: “I do not retire to rest. The mainland Chinese church is huge and complicated. Sometimes the pope wants me to give him some advice, so I need more time to research it.”
The Cardinal has been an outspoken human rights critic of the CCP. The state-sanctioned religious group, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, has around seven million members in China, and it is estimated that several million belong to underground churches throughout the country.
For more information on China-Vatican relations, see past CDT posts.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
