Card. Etchegaray, "man of dialogue and peace"

The Basque cardinal was former president of the French Bishops' Conference and carried out an intense international activity that led him, among other things, to China and Vietnam.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - "Man of dialogue and peace". This is how Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who died yesterday, was remembered in the prayer of Pope Francis at the Mass celebrated this morning in Maputo, Mozambique.

The Basque cardinal, as he was often called, was born in the heart of the Basque country, in Espelette (diocese of Bayonne, France), on 25 September 1922.

Son of a mechanic, he was ordained a priest on 13 July 1947. Lively and brilliant, in 1961 he was deputy director of the Secretariat of the French episcopate, of which in 1966 he became general secretary.

Appointed auxiliary bishop of Paris in 1969, the following year he was promoted archbishop of Marseille and in 1975 he was elected president of the French Bishops' Conference. It would remain in this post until 1981.

In the meantime, since 1965 he was the secretary of the Liaison Committee of the Bishops' Conferences of Europe and in 1971 he was made the first president of the new European Council of Episcopal Conferences.

On April 8, 1984, John Paul II, who created him cardinal on June 30, 1979, appointed him president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (an office held until June 24, 1998) and of the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum" (up to to 2 December 1995). His work in these fields would lead him to carry out an intense international activity that will see him, among other things, in China and Vietnam.

"I discovered China - he wrote himself - in four trips: the first time in 1980, then in 1993, in 2000 and in 2003 ... but it would take forty to say I knew it". "To really enter China, you have to go through the door of the heart, of friendship, as Matteo Ricci understood, this educated sixteenth century Jesuit who wrote a delightful "treatise on friendship" before being introduced into the imperial court. During my first stay in Beijing, I was given a plaque: the word "friendship" was written on a plum blossom, the most resistant to storms. And every time I returned to China, I did it in the company of Matteo Ricci".

"What appears ever more necessary and urgent is unity around the Pope, with respect for the freedom of conscience that every State must protect. And this reunification necessarily passes through the evangelical path of reconciliation. The current situation of the Church is anachronistic, even in a Marxist environment, and in the long run it becomes unhealthy. The wounds and grudges are still so alive that some tend to protect their Catholic identity by hiding it under the guise of sects that are swarming. The Chinese Catholics, more conscious of the fact that the credibility of their testimony depends on their visible unity, count on the support of the universal Church for this, which however, cannot perform the sacrifices requested from afar by their current condition. As one bishop told me: "We built many churches, help us build the Church of Peter and Paul" ".

In 1989, on the occasion of his trip to Vietnam, the first of a Vatican prelate, John Paul II, gave him a message for the Vietnamese bishops to encourage them and recommend they safeguard unity. A delicate subject given the attempts of the communist government - the attempt to carve a patriotic Church on the Chinese model - failed to create divisions in the episcopate.

The cardinal's input set in motion a journey that encountered the "doi moi" season, of political and economic renewal initiated by the VIth congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1987. A rapprochement sealed by the visit of the president of the republic Nguyen Minh Triet to Benedict XVI in Vatican in December 2009, the first in history.

And he was also John Paul II’s "mission impossible man" such as when he went to Jerusalem in 2002, to ask for peace in the Middle East and the following year he went to Baghdad to Saddam Hussein to try to avert the war.(FP)