In his modest home on a windswept hill outside Shanghai, Bishop Aloysius Jin Lu Xian still had his Christmas cards strung below the ceiling when I called to see him one grey February day.
He proudly pointed out some of the signatures. Many were of fellow Roman Catholic prelates around the world, including Cardinal John O'Connor of New York.
Bishop Jin, however, is a leading member of the Beijing-approved Catholic Church in China which officially does not recognise the Pope's authority, and which is shunned by many loyal Catholics in China and throughout the world. His group is not allowed by the Chinese government to recognise the Pope's authority to appoint bishops, and it appoints its own, whom the Vatican in turn does not acknowledge.
Rome prefers to identify with those persecuted Chinese Catholics who recognise the Pope and who often find themselves imprisoned when they try to organise.
But nothing is quite what it seems in the opaque and difficult relationship between two most secretive world institutions, the Vatican and the Chinese government.
Many contradictions such as Bishop Jin's close ties to American and European bishops - and his visit to Maynooth not long ago - became evident this week as Pope John Paul opened a synod of 250 bishops on the future of the Catholic Church in Asia.
For the first time, the Pope invited two bishops of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, as the government-approved body is known, to attend the Synod: Bishop Matthias Duan Yinming (90), and his assistant, Bishop Joseph Xu Zhixuan (82), both from the city of Wanhsien.
The invitation raised the question of where the bishops' loyalty lay. "First of all, they are loyal to the Pope," explained Bishop John Tong Hon of Hong Kong. He said Bishop Duan was respected by both the underground church and the official Chinese "Patriotic" Church.
No visas have yet been issued to the two bishops, and China has responded to the papal initiative with a move which seems designed to defuse criticism of its record on religious rights while gaining maximum political advantage.
The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association said that Pope John Paul would be "welcome" to visit China. This invitation, clearly approved by the Chinese leadership, was accompanied by a condition. The Vatican must first switch its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to mainland China.
Taiwan is regarded by Beijing as a breakaway province and is recognised by only 30 countries besides the Vatican.
Relations between China and the Vatican were broken off 40 years ago after the Pope excommunicated two Chinese bishops appointed by the communist leadership. China set up the Patriotic Church to control the nation's Catholics, and many of the exhausted congregations seized the chance to practise their faith openly. But for others, loyalty to the Pope remained paramount and they went underground, and often to jail.
Bishop Fu Tieshan, chairman of the Beijing-approved church group, said this week: "If the political problems between the two states are resolved it will open new prospects in the relations between the two churches."
He pointed out that since the 1970s more than 5,000 Catholic churches have been restored and that the official Chinese Catholic Church had no differences with the Pope on matters of religious belief and prayed for the Pope at masses in all churches.
There are about four million registered Catholics in China out of a population of 1.2 billion. Bishop Zen, appointed by the Pope to Hong Kong last year, estimates that there are the same number of unofficial Catholics.
The Vatican keeps links open by allowing financial aid to sectors of the Patriotic Church in China and permitting outside Catholic bishops to train Chinese seminarians.
If there is a thaw in Vatican-Beijing relations in the making, it could date to the days before the return of Hong Kong to China in July last year, when Bishop Zen and two colleagues travelled to Beijing and opened a dialogue with communist leaders over the future of the Catholic Church in what was then British territory.
Bishop Zen told me in an interview in his Hong Kong office that he believed most "patriotic" Catholics in China secretly supported Rome.
"They are forced to call themselves an independent church, but in their hearts they are all with the Holy Father," he said.
He also claimed that "two-thirds of those official bishops have already asked for and received the recognition of the Holy Father, but in secret, because to make it public would compromise their work."
But the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, said there seemed little hope of a thaw in relations with Beijing in the near future. "We cannot talk about concrete initiatives. We cannot even talk about an opening except for a certain open channel of third parties [which] has not been very positive," he said.
The Pope has often appealed to Beijing to legalise the underground church and allow its members to worship openly.
Cardinal Angelo Sodano said recently in Rome that the Vatican had asked China's permission to send a delegation to solve the rift between the two groups but had received no reply. The situation worries the Vatican because of the spectre of schism.
When the Pope named 22 new cardinals in February, he kept two of them in pectore or a secret, a procedure intended to protect prelates working in hostile conditions. One is believed to be from China.
In a sign of improving relations with religious bodies, China invited three US religious leaders on an unprecedented three-week mission across China in February. The trio, a Roman Catholic bishop, a Protestant leader and a rabbi, said China was paying increased attention to religion and that they had "established a dialogue on the highest level on the issue of religious freedom in China."
However, human rights groups claim little has changed on the ground. Two underground Catholic priests in Hebei province were arrested this month, according to the US-based Cardinal Kung Foundation. It said the cases were "signs of irrefutable continuous religious persecution" in China.
Reuters reports: Negotiators from Taiwan arrived yesterday in Beijing to hold the first talks between the two Chinas in nearly three years.
The head of the delegation from Taipei's semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation, Mr Jan Jyhhorng, said at Beijing's Capital Airport that he hoped the talks would mark a fresh start in ties with the mainland.
"Although relations between the two sides have experienced setbacks in the past, we hope that in future both sides can, with mutual and sincere efforts, bid farewell to a harsh winter and embrace spring," Mr Jan said.
The two sides have not met since 33 months ago, when Beijing broke off negotiations after the Taiwanese President, Mr Lee Teng-hui, made a high-profile visit to the US in 1995.