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"The Vatican has some problems in its communications with the French episcopate," the editorial said.

The Polish episcopate and local bishop acknowledged the burning, but declined to comment, AFP reported.

The letter, dated Jan. 1, is Pope Francis’ most explicit acknowledgment yet of the tensions between him and the U.S. episcopate.

It was painful, he wrote, to watch “an episcopate lacking in unity and concentrated more on pointing fingers than on seeking paths of reconciliation.”

He said Orthodox unity could be preserved only through the “resistance of our people, our clergy, our episcopate, to every mean trick, to every heresy, to every schism”.