Moscow Ties Warming but Response Is Chilly in Beijing : Pope Bats .500 With Communist Giants

John Paul II, who has traveled farther and tried harder to broaden the Roman Catholic Church’s international contacts than any Pope before him, is “one for two” in his patient attempts to win a thaw in Vatican relations with the Communist giants.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s new-look Soviets and their allies in East Europe seem willing to meet the Pope halfway. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s Chinese are not at all interested.

Both the Pope’s success and his failure will be highlighted publicly before year’s end. In prospect is an expected Gorbachev visit to the Vatican and a papal trip to Asia already marked by a snub from the Chinese.

Part of State Visit

Long rumored, Gorbachev’s call at the Vatican should come in late November as part of a state visit by the Soviet leader to Italy. The precise timing of Gorbachev’s visit is not yet firm, but it will likely include the first encounter between a Roman pontiff and a Soviet chief of state.

The Pope long ago said publicly that he would welcome an encounter with Gorbachev, reinforcing his message with a letter last year carried to Moscow by Vatican prelates to ceremonies marking the 1,000th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in what is now the Ukraine. Gorbachev responded positively in a letter delivered to John Paul by a Soviet envoy last month.

New Minsk Bishop

The warming trend was highlighted over the summer by papal appointment, with Soviet government approval, of a new bishop in the city of Minsk as head of the estimated 2 million Catholics in the Soviet republic of Byelorussia. The appointment, sought by the Vatican for nearly two decades, was the first in Byelorussia since the Russian Revolution. Again with Kremlin consent, the Vatican also restored much of the church’s administrative structure in Lithuania earlier this year.

Under John Paul’s opening to the East, the Vatican has established full diplomatic relations with Poland, a first with any Warsaw Pact country, and named four new bishops in Czechoslovakia, whose relations with the Holy See until recently were glacial.

Papal visits are also planned over the next two years to Soviet client Cuba and to reformist Hungary. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano last week applauded Hungary’s internal liberalization and its decision to allow free passage of East German refugees to the West. Noting the “growing liberty in which the church operates in Hungary,” the paper said the Vatican is ready to negotiate re-establishment of diplomatic relations.

On Friday, the Hungarian government announced in Budapest that it definitely desires to resume full diplomatic ties with the Roman Catholic Church, saying that “Internal and external circumstances are ripe . . . for the opening of a new era.”

Although the Vatican and the Kremlin share foreign policy goals in some areas, such as in the search for peace in Lebanon, there is markedly less common ground on the incendiary issue of religious freedom. For John Paul, that is a fundamental, visceral issue. For Gorbachev, it is a hot potato, particularly in the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, where religion and nationalism go hand in hand and both have been systematically suppressed for decades by the Kremlin.

Of particular interest to the Pope is the Ukraine, where an underground church of about 4 million Catholics remains in communion with Rome despite official proscription.

Rally Permitted

Soviet officials in Lvov did not interfere with a protest demonstration of Ukrainian Catholics there on Sunday. Thousands rallied to demand return of the church’s legal status in the Soviet Union, which Josef Stalin ordered absorbed into the state-approved Russian Orthodox Church.

Vatican officials consider it doubtful that a John Paul-Gorbachev meeting would presage a papal trip to the Soviet Union. Although John Paul has said repeatedly that he would like to go, he has asserted even more frequently that he would visit the Soviet Union only if he could meet freely with Catholics in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

In sharp contrast to the trend in Europe, the lack of progress in building Vatican-China bridges is plain in the context of the pontiff’s next foreign trip, the 44th of his 11-year reign.

The Pope leaves Oct. 6 for South Korea, then spends five days in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, and two on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean before returning to Rome on Oct. 16.

Alitalia, which will fly the papal charter, asked permission to overfly China on the outbound leg. It was refused, so John Paul’s plane instead will fly a 13-hour polar route to Seoul.

Courtesy Cables

One trademark of all papal flights, clearly not lost on the Chinese, is the Pope’s practice of sending a brief courtesy cable of greetings to the government of each country over which his plane passes. Typically, the head of state replies with matching pleasantries. In refusing overflight permission, the Chinese government makes plain that it finds nothing to be gained by even an exchange of messages.

Officially, there are no Chinese Catholics in communion with Rome; all belong to the government-authorized Patriotic Assn. of Chinese Catholics. The Patriotic Church, as it is called, is de facto nationalistic with no foreign links. The Vatican considers China’s 53 bishops named by the Patriotic Church to be illicit. They head 2,700 religious personnel who preside at about 2,000 churches restored in China over the past decade with government consent.

In planning the forthcoming Asia trip, a stop was considered for Hong Kong or Portuguese Macao, which would have given John Paul a platform from which to speak to China. The idea was scotched to avoid aggravating the Chinese. So, for the same reason, was a stop in Taiwan, where the church operates freely.