VATICAN CITY (UCAN) — The Vatican has announced that all papal texts will be available in Chinese on the Holy See website from March 19.

The Pope’s letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007 was available on the Vatican website in traditional and simplified Chinese

From that date, Internet users worldwide will be able to access all of Pope Benedict XVI’s texts in both traditional and simplified Chinese.

The Vatican announced this development on March 16, on the eve of the Pope’s first visit to Africa from March 17-23, his 11th foreign trip.

Significantly, the Vatican made the announcement not only in Italian and English but also in Chinese.

“The official website of the Holy See will be enhanced by the addition of a new section in Chinese,” the Vatican stated in a press communique. It said the service will begin on the feast of Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church.

Chinese is the eighth language and the first non-European one to be used by the Holy See to make papal texts and other major Vatican documents available online. The other seven languages are English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and Spanish.

Chinese Church leaders, at a Vatican meeting earlier, had expressed the wish that Vatican documents be published in Chinese in addition to the other European languages.

In a first this year, the Pope’s Lenten message was published in Chinese in February. Sources told UCA News in Rome that the Pope’s forthcoming social encyclical, which will deal with the present economic crisis and other social issues, will also be published in Chinese.

Thanks to this new service, Chinese Catholics and other Chinese internet users will be able to access all these texts, provided they are not prevented from doing so by authorities blocking the sites.

This new Church development could mean that the Vatican Channel on YouTube could also become accessible in Chinese.

Since 1998, the Holy See has been present on the Internet in Chinese through the Fides International Agency (www.fides.org), the news service of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

The Holy See has also presented its information in Chinese on the Vatican Radio site (www.radiovaticana.org) since 1990, though these have not always been accessible to Catholics and others in mainland China due to official blocking of access.

China broke off diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1951, but in recent years the two sides have recommenced a dialogue and relations have begun to improve. The two sides now engage in dialogue, aimed at understanding and overcoming problems mostly relating to the situation of the Catholic Church on the mainland. The Holy See hopes this dialogue can help both sides find mutually acceptable solutions and open the path to diplomatic relations.

The establishment of a Chinese section on the Holy See’s website is yet another sign of the importance the Holy See attaches to developing its relations with China, and to improving its communication with the estimated 15 million Catholics on the mainland and with Chinese Catholics as a whole.