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Pope’s weekly audiences to be translated into Mandarin from December
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 27, 2024
1 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
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Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 27, 2024
1 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis said on Wednesday that his teachings at his weekly general audience at the Vatican would also be translated into Mandarin starting from next week.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis said on Wednesday that his teachings at his weekly general audience at the Vatican would also be translated into Mandarin starting from next week.
At the audiences held every Wednesday, Pope Francis speaks in Italian, and his teachings are translated and read out in English, French, German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.
“Next week, with the Advent (period starting), the Chinese translation will also be here in the audience,” he said, likely referring to Mandarin, China’s official language.
Relations between the Vatican and communist China have historically been fraught, but Pope Francis has made it a priority to normalise them.
In October, the Vatican and China extended an accord on the appointment of Catholic bishops in the North Asian country for four years, pointing to a new level of trust between the two parties.
The Vatican said the agreement, initially struck in 2018, resolved a decades-long split between an underground church loyal to the pope and the China-supervised Catholic Patriotic Association, which operates independently of the Holy See.
There are an estimated 10 to 12 million Catholics in China.
(Reporting by Cristina Carlevaro, editing by Giulia Segreti and Bernadette Baum)
The Vatican is an independent city-state enclaved within Rome, Italy, and serves as the spiritual and administrative center of the Roman Catholic Church.
A Catholic bishop is a senior member of the clergy in the Catholic Church, responsible for overseeing a diocese and ensuring the spiritual and administrative needs of the church are met.
The Catholic Patriotic Association is an organization in China that oversees the activities of the Catholic Church in the country, operating independently of the Vatican.
Advent is a season in the Christian liturgical calendar that begins four Sundays before Christmas, marking a time of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
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