The Vatican and Myanmar agreed to establish full diplomatic relations today during State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit to the Holy See.
Suu Kyi also met with Pope Francis during her visit for about 30 minutes. The Pope also gave her a copy of his 2017 message for the Church’s World day of Peace, titled Non-violence: a style of politics for peace.
A passage from the message reads: “[M]any and diverse are the individuals and social groups treated with indifference and subjected to injustice and violence. They too are part of our ‘family’; they too are our brothers and sisters. The politics of nonviolence have to begin in the home and then spread to the entire human family.”
“Certainly, differences can cause frictions. But let us face them constructively and non-violently, so that ‘tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity,’ preserving ‘what is valid and useful on both sides,'” it continues.
The gesture comes during the State Counsellor’s tour of Europe, during which she has repeatedly been asked to answer for the Myanmar military’s mistreatment of the country’s ethnic minorities. On Tuesday, she dismissed a UN resolution calling for an investigation into alleged atrocities committed by Myanmar’s military against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.
During a joint press conference, EU foreign minister Federica Mogherini expressed her disagreement with Suu Kyi and reiterated the need for an independent investigation.
Pope Francis has also lent his voice to the international chorus of support for the Rohingya. During an audience in February, the Pope said of the Rohingya: “They have been suffering, they are being tortured and killed, simply because they uphold their Muslim faith.”
He asked listeners to pray with him “for our Rohingya brothers and sisters who are being chased from Myanmar and are fleeing from one place to another because no one wants them.”
A statement from the Vatican said the decision to establish diplomatic relations would “promote bonds of mutual friendship.” According to Reuters, the move means “the Vatican will have much more diplomatic influence in Myanmar.”
Before today’s agreement, the Vatican was represented in Myanmar by an apostolic delegate based in Thailand. Each country will now be represented in the other by a full-fledged ambassador.
According to the CIA, Christians of all sorts make up around 6 percent of Myanmar’s 57 million people, with groups of Baptists and other Protestants concentrated among ethnic minorities.
Christians say they are subject to some of the same persecution and discrimination faced by the Rohingya.
A key issue for the Catholic Church in Myanmar is its ability to support Catholic education. All Church schools were nationalized in 1965 following the 1962 military coup in the former British colony.
The Church has recently been able to invest in schools again, but supported establishments have to be registered in the names of private individuals rather than being officially run by the Church.
“We hope to obtain equality of treatment with respect to other religions in this respect,” the archbishop of Yangon, Charles Bo, said in a March interview with French website Eglises d’Asie (Churches of Asia).
The establishment of ties leaves only strongly Muslim Brunei and the officially communist regimes of China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam as the only Asian states not to have full diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
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