During the reception, Chairman Vũ Chiến Thắng exchanged with the guests the religious life in the country and stated that the Party and State of Vietnam always implement the consistent policy for respecting and safeguarding the religious freedom to all people and equality of religions, as well as highly appreciate Catholics’ contributions to the cause of national construction and defense.

The GCRA Chairman also affirmed the Vietnam-Vatican relation has achieved a lot of progress for the past decades and expressed hope that, and upon the mutual respect and understanding, the relation between Vietnam and the Vatican will be strengthened in the coming time.

The GCRA leader also took the chance to thank the Holy See for encouraging  and guiding the Vietnam Catholic Church to contribute more to the shared development in the country, as well as its ministries for relations with states and doctrine of the faith for facilitating delegation visits of Vietnamese authorities to the Vatican over the past years.

Vatican’s Under-Secretary Antoine Camilleri  expressed his thanks to the government religious committee and concerning authorities of Viet Nam for creating favorable conditions extended to the Catholic Church in Vietnam, as well as to the non-resident special envoy of the Holy See during his working mission in the country that ended last year. Given willingness, sincerity and upon the joint-working-group mechanism for developing bilateral ties established, the Vietnam-Vatican relation will go smoothly and see more progresses ahead, he added.

PTT