South Korean priests favour talks with North

PRIESTS from South Korea's two dioceses are supporting talks with communist North Korea. 43 priests from the Inchon Diocese, which borders North Korea, called for dialogue during their annual meeting in early September.
Priests from the Diocese of Seoul, South Korea's capital, planned to discuss the issue at their annual gathering later in the month. The agendas of the meetings also included discussions of liberation theology as related to Marxism, North Korean leader Kim II Sung and the South Korean student movement.
Seoul diocesan pastoral workers focused on the same issues at their meeting in February, and a series of talks for lay people scheduled for this year is also to include liberation theology and relations with the north.
Bishop Rene Dupont of
Andong, South Korea, said it was significant that North Korea had welcomed a two-man Vatican delegation to a non aligned nations meeting in its capital, Pyongyang, this June. However, he also noted there is no apparent change in the communist regime's suppression• of the church.
Vatican sources said before the non-aligned conference that its representatives, Msgr Guiseppe Bertello, a member of the Vaticans UN mission in Geneva, and Fr John Ik Chang, were to meet with North Korean officials, but had no plans to raise specific issues.
According to a World Council of Churches report, there are about 800 Catholics in the communist state. Twenty years ago, approximately 100,000 Catholics were estimated to live in North Korea.