China needs more clergies to serve the development of Catholicism in the country, which has seen its believers swell from no more than 2 million five decades ago to more than 5.3 million currently, a political advisor said on Saturday.

More than 100,000 people in China are converted to Catholicism annually in recent years. Although the number of priests has increased from 1,100 in the early 1950s to more than 1,900, they are still too few to serve the country's millions of believers, said Liu Bainian, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), ahead of the top advisory body's annual session that opens Saturday afternoon.

China now has 97 Catholic parishes, but 42 have no bishops, and 29 parishes' bishops are over the age of 85, said Liu, vice president of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Hopefully, the opening of China's largest seminary in Beijing last September is expected to help address the problem, he told Xinhua.

The National Seminary of the Catholic Church in China, located in Daxing District of Beijing, invites 24 foreign and Chinese professors to give lectures and help train priests, Liu said.

The Chinese government has offered about 74 million yuan (US$9.2 million) to fund the construction of the seminary.

"The development of Catholicism depends on the training of more professionals and further improvement of their expertise," Liu said.

According to Liu, China now has more than 6,000 Catholic churches, 12 academies and nearly 70 convents.

About 95 percent of Catholic priests in China age about 30 and 200 of them have been selected for further studies in universities and seminaries in the United States, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and some other European and Asian countries.

Liu also noted that Catholicism encourages love and tolerance for others, which can help promote the building of a harmonious society in the country.

The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association has funded the building of nearly 70 elementary schools, about 30 kindergartens and more than 200 medical clinics across the country, Liu said.
 
(Xinhua News Agency March 3, 2007)