Any hope that China and the Vatican might soon heal their rift are vanishing.

And while Pope Benedict XVI tours Turkey this week, you can bet he's keeping an eye cocked on China.

China is about to allow the ordination of a new Catholic bishop without the blessing of the Holy See, the third time this year it is defying the Vatican.

For half a century, China has said it can name its own Catholic bishops. The Vatican considers such an act heresy and threatens excommunication.

So a lot will be at stake this Thursday at 8 a.m. in a small diocese in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, when the vicar general, Wang Renlei, will be ordained as a bishop.

There certainly must be frictions in Beijing over this. Diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would love to strike up relations with the Vatican after a 55-year hiatus. After all, Taiwan’s only ally in all of Europe is the Vatican. It has no diplomatic relations with any other European nation.

That means Taiwanese President Chen Shuibian has to jump through all sorts of diplomatic hoops if he wants to transit through Europe on any foreign trip.

Blocking any move on the diplomatic front, though, is the Patriotic Catholic Association, an entity that exists only to run the Catholic church of China, a task the Vatican is more than happy to do. If relations with the Vatican were renewed with a stroke of the diplomatic pen, a lot of jobs and bureaucracy at the association would vanish.

According to an Italian news site, the Patriotic Catholic Association "is trying to ordain dozens of bishops without the approval of the Holy See, for the purpose of destroying all the work of reconciliation carried out so far between the Chinese Church and the Pope."

Most bishops in China have quietly sought reconciliation with the Vatican.