VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The persecuted Catholic Church in China needs and deserves the prayers of Catholics throughout the world, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“There, as elsewhere, Christ is living his passion” because of government restrictions and pressures on the Church, the Pope said May 18 at the end of his weekly general audience.

He asked Catholics everywhere to observe May 24, the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, as a day of prayer for Catholics in mainland China. Pope Benedict established the annual day of prayer in 2007 when he wrote a letter to Catholics in China outlining ways to promote greater unity between those exercising their faith clandestinely and those participating in communities overseen by the government-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

At his general audience, the Pope emphasized the need for unity between the Church in China and Rome.

“Chinese Catholics, as they have said many times, want unity with the universal Church, with the supreme pastor, with the Successor of Peter,” he said. China’s communist government has insisted on controlling the country’s Catholic community, defining ties with the Vatican as interference in its internal affairs.

“By our prayers we can obtain for the Church in China that it remain one, holy and Catholic, faithful and steadfast in doctrine and in ecclesial discipline,” the Pope said.
Pope Benedict offered special prayers for the bishops, priests and laity who face severe limits on their freedom and their exercise of the faith.

“By our prayers we can help them to find the path to keep their faith alive, to keep their hope strong, to keep their love for all people ardent” and to avoid “the temptation to follow a path independent of Peter,” the Pope said.

The Pope’s remarks came after his main audience talk on the power of intercessory prayer.

One of the strongest early examples in the Bible of praying on behalf of others, he said, is the story of Abraham asking God to spare the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, if he could find 10 innocent people there.

Abraham “doesn’t stop at asking God to save the innocent. He asks for the forgiveness of the entire city, and he does so appealing to the justice of God,” the Pope said. The patriarch’s prayer reveals “a new idea of justice, one that is not limited to punishing the guilty, as human beings do,” he said.

Speaking in Polish, the Pope said Abraham’s prayers for Sodom and Gomorrah should be “an example to us to trustingly implore the mercy of God for ourselves and our whole world.”

Pope Benedict said he would be discussing biblical examples of prayer for several weeks as a stimulus for people to get to know the Bible, “which I hope you have at home.”