(Photo: Prelates pay respects to Patriarch Pavel, 15 Nov 2009/Ivan Milutinovic)

If U.S. voters elected their president in the same way the Serbian Orthodox Church chooses it patriarch, they could have seen Ralph Nader, Ross Perot or other third place finishers taking up residence in the White House. That’s because the Church, in a move originally aimed at thwarting Communist authorities, uses a system that incorporates a lottery within the election by church elders to choose a leader.

The Holy Synod of Bishops, the Church’s top executive body, will use that system within the next three months to elect a successor to Patriarch Pavle, who died on Sunday. Pavle headed the Serbian Orthodox Church during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s as Serbs warred with neighbours of other faiths.

Pavle, 95, died at Belgrade’s Military Hospital where he had been treated since 2007 for various ailments. As his health deteriorated, although nominally still head of the church until death, Pavle had given up its day-to-day running in 2008 to Bishop Amfilohije, who is seen as a Serb nationalist on issues such as Kosovo.

(Photo: Patriarch Pavle, 24 March 2001/Ivan Milutinovic)

The Holy Synod of Bishops will first convene the Holy Assembly which will then decide to initiate the proceedings of electing a new patriarch in a so-called Apostolic Vote.  “At least two-thirds of  metropolitans, active bishops, candidates for bishops who run dioceses for more than five years must attend, and those absent may delegate power of attorney to another participant,” said Jovan Janjic, a Belgrade-based analyst with the weekly NIN magazine.

Each member of the assembly votes for  the three candidates and the vote is repeated until the selection is narrowed to three. After balloting, names of the  three top candidates with more than 50 percent of backing are put in three sealed envelopes. “It all becomes a lottery then,” Janjic said.

The names of the three candidates are placed inside a Bible and after a holy service, a specially selected monk who prepares for the task through fasting and praying, takes the envelope from the Bible, shuffles the three names and pulls out one.  The presiding bishop immediately takes the envelope, opens it in plain view of others and announces the name of the new patriarch.

The so-called “Apostolic Vote” was introduced in 1967 as a move tailored to curb the  influence of  Communist authorities in the former Yugoslavia on the appointment of patriarchs. At the time authorities said the Holy Spirit should lead the hand of the monk therefore excluding all human interference. This voting system dates back to 1917 when the Russian Orthodox Church used it to pick Patriarch Tikhon, its first leader after the patriarchate was restored following a 200-year suppression.

(Photo: Bishop Amfilohije, 15 Nov 2009/Ivan Milutinovic)

The Russian Orthodox Church did not use this method in January when it elected its new patriarch, Kirill, in a secret ballot with multiple candidates.

Insiders say the lobbying and politicking between the candidates and their supporters is as fervent as in a U.S. or European style election campaign.

Three bishops — hardline Montenegrin Amfilohije close to nationalist parties, moderate Irinej from the northern Serbian Backa diocese and another moderate Grigorije from the Serb region of Bosnia — are the key contenders. According to sources from the Holy Patriarchate, Amfilohije and Irinej are the two top candidates as they can muster backing of at least 15 bishops each. Grigorije, considered modern and pro-European, has  the backing of several younger bishops,  as well as from rank-and-file clergy and faithful.

“We may speculate as long as we want and it is clear that the three are the most popular. But at the end it is the Apostolic Vote that decides. And there are always dark horses in this race,” the source said.

In 1991, Patriarch Pavle was chosen after nine rounds of voting as a monk picked him over two other candidates including Amfilohije.

(Photo: Candles for Patriach Pavle at Belgrade’s Saint Sava Church, 15 Nov 2009/Marko Djurica)

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

Anniversaries are a time to look back at how the world was before the historic event being commemorated. During a recent trip to Berlin in advance of today’s 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, I asked the former East German theologian and politician Richard Schröder for his recollections of the life as a Protestant pastor before the country fell apart. He zeroed in on a fascinating aspect of the Communists’ anti-religion policy I’d never heard about before.

(Photo: Richard Schröder, 21 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

“The Communists who took over in 1945 were trained in Russia,” he told me at his home in a southern suburb of Berlin. “Their model was the Russian Orthodox Church, which focuses heavily on the liturgy. By contrast, Protestant churches have always been a wide field that included Bible study and other discussion groups. All the charity work of the Protestant churches, like their hospitals, were started by what you might call grass roots movements of congregation members. They were not started by the churches themselves. But the Communists always tried to handle us as if we were Russian Orthodox.”

One way to do this was to demand the churches register in advance any meeting except their Sunday church services and the internal sessions of the church leadership. Officials were especially suspicious of the churches’ youth activities, such as camping trips that included Bible study sessions. The churches refused to agree because this would have been a way to block such activities without banning them outright — all they would have to do was fail to issue permission for the meeting. “The state made a second effort to impose this registration, but the churches decided to pay all the fines and not register the meetings. They got away with it. When the officials noticed the churches always paid the 500 mark fine but kept on holding their meetings, they stopped imposing the fine. It took a long time for the Communists to understand that the Protestant churches are a different version of Christianity than the strongly liturgical Orthodox Church.”

(Image: Falling church membership figures in East Germany — purple for Protestants, yellow for Catholics/ Forum of Contemporary History Leipzig)

Communist officials also seem to have had problems figuring out the theological differences between Russian Orthodox and German Lutherans.  “The Orthodox Church didn’t go through the Enlightenment,” Schröder said. “It maintained a sacred worship in which the miraculous, including some pious fraud, played a big role. Lenin once suggested to use the arguments of the French Enlightenment in the fight against religion. So the East German Communists did that here. They didn’t know that every Protestant theology student here had already learned all these arguments. They were old hat. The state established a chair for atheism at Jena University to promote anti-religious propaganda. The professor started to read Lutheran theology and had to admit it had already had its debate with the Enlightenment. They decided to stop using simple arguments like Darwin versus creationism or that the Sputnik didn’t find God out in space. They saw that didn’t work.”

This change of strategy in the 1970s led to the first meeting in 1978 between party leader Erich Honecker and the Protestant church leadership. The state toned down its atheist propaganda and tried to find ways to cooperate with the churches. “The party was aiming for a modus vivendi to boost good will with West Germany because they needed financial credits from them. West Germany had told East Germany it would measure its good will among other things by how they treated the churches.” This eased the situation for pastors, who didn’t have to fear getting arrested anymore, but officials still harrassed them by barring their children from attending high school.

Despite this limited detente, some Communist officials still took a long time to get away from the Russian Orthodox model they’d learned about in their Marxism-Leninism training, Schröder said. When they met him as a young Protestant pastor, they talked about the “dignitaries” of the church, as if they were Orthodox patriarchs dressed in ornate vestments. “Here I was, a bearded man in jeans, and I was suddenly a dignitary!” he laughed.

After East Germany collapsed, researchers found in the archives of the State Secretariat for Religious Affairs that the Communist officials slowly realised that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his experiences in resistance to the Nazis was very important for Lutheran theology in East Germany. “

(Photo: Protest symbol saying “Swords into Plowshares –  Peace Prayers in St. Nicholas Church — Every Monday at 5 p.m.” in Leipzig, 16 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

“By 1988-89 they finally understood how the Protestant church ticks,” Schröder said. “The motto “A church for others” played a big role in East Germany and it came from Bonhoeffer. They should have been able to see that Protestants had already debated during the Nazi period the question of how Christians should behave in a totalitarian state. We even had the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church during the Nazi period printed in our hymnbooks.” That 1934 document rejected the Nazis’ bid to subordinate the churches to the state.

By 1988-1989, of course, the protest movement linked to the Protestant churches was too far developed to be contained by some new manipulative strategy by the state. The Stasi secret police had at least 800  informers — many of the church officials and pastors — reporting from inside the churches about what was happening there, according to Stasi documents opened up after Germany reunited. They produced vast amounts of secret reports and betrayed large numbers of church members but were useless in stopping history when it happened.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

As Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some Protestants feel the crucial role their church played in shepharding the democracy movement to success is quietly being overlooked. This seems strange to someone like myself who reported on those events back then. Any reporter in Berlin in the tense weeks before Nov. 9, 1989 knew the Protestant (mostly Lutheran) churches sheltered dissidents and was working for reform. But the idea that this was fading from public view came up during my recent visit to Leipzig when, at an organ recital in Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Thomas Church (Thomaskirche), the pastor mentioned the point in a sermon.

(Photo: St. Thomas Church in Leipzig with Bach statue, 17 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

When I later went up to Berlin, I ran the idea past a leading east German Protestant theologian and a pastor and two parish council members from the Gethsemane Church (Gethsemanekirche). That church in eastern Berlin was one of the most active centres of protest in the tense months before demonstrators forced open the Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. They all agreed.

The many anniversary celebrations, documentaries and discussions now underway across Germany seem to focus mostly on how fearless street protesters and astute politicians pulled off the “peaceful revolution” that ended communism. Films and photos of dissidents packed into the Gethsemane Church in East Berlin or Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche), the leading houses of worship that sheltered them until the Wall opened , are among the trademark images.  But those crowded “peace prayer” evenings were only the tip of the iceberg of behind-the-scenes work by pastors and lay people who considered it their Christian duty to promote civil rights and human dignity in a rigid communist society.

At the organ recital, Rev. Christian Wolff illustrated the point by mentioning a recent commemoration in Leipzig attended by German President Horst Köhler, Chancellor Angela Merkel and other dignitaries.  “At the ceremony, Werner Schulz spoke of the role of the churches — nobody else did,” he noted, referring to a former East German dissident who is now a European Parliament deputy. Köhler didn’t go into it in his speech, the main address of the day. While the Protestant churches didn’t claim all the credit for the success of the protests, Wolff said, “it wasn’t just a quirk of history that Christians took leading roles in the late 1980s.” They acted out of their religious convictions that each person had God-given dignity and rights that the communists were denying them.

(Photo: St. Nicholas Church, 9 Oct 2009/Steffen Schellhorn)

Richard Schröder, the East German theologian who was a Social Democratic politician in the transition period and then headed the theology faculty at Berlin’s Humboldt University, agreed the churches’ role was being overlooked. “In the media reporting now, the Wall seems to have fallen without any pre-history,” he told me during an interview at his home south of the capital. “Western German public opinion doesn’t have a clear perception of the churches’ role.” He thought the dynamics of politics and the media in united Germany played a part in changing the public perception of 1989.  Most politicians and journalists come from western Germany, he said, and had no experience of the underground activity bubbling below East Germany’s calm surface during the 1980s. Because 3/4 of eastern Germans belong to no church, the westerners underestimate the influence the churches had, even among the non-religious. This is the image that is now being repeated in speeches and television documentaries around Germany, Schröder said.

The pre-history to the Wall’s fall goes back at least to the early 1980s, when underground groups opposed to the superpower arms race linked up with activist pastors increasingly critical of the regimentation of life under the communists. In 1982, Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church launched weekly “peace prayers” mixing Gospel readings with political debates. Police did not break up church services, so these sessions gave dissidents a freedom of speech and assembly they could find nowhere else.

(Photo: Nikolaikirche - offen fuer alle (St. Nicholas Church - open for all), 18 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Similar alliances emerged in many cities, aided by the large network of parishes maintained by the Protestants, who far outnumbered the cautious Catholic minority. By 1988, the Stasi secret police counted 160 such groups, almost all connected to the churches.  In the debates, pastors sometimes cited models such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian executed for resisting the Nazis, and the non-violent strategy of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King. In guidelines for participants at his Monday evening “peace prayers,” St. Nicholas Church pastor Rev. Christian Führer laid down the rule that “participants and their contributions to the debate may not contradict the Gospel of the crucified Christ and its message of reconciliation and must be based on the commandments of God insofar as they aim to preserve life.”

Such activist pastors were a minority among the clergy, but became a majority in the political parties that formed in the autumn of 1989. The speaking and organisational skills developed in their church careers, one of the few areas of East German life not controlled by the communists, clearly helped them to take charge.

As Werner Schulz put it in the speech that Pastor Wolff cited, “the peaceful revolution was, at its core, also a Protestant revolution … Its pioneering motto ‘no violence’ was the essence of the Sermon on the Mount, the most revolutionary passage in the Gospel…  Protestant churches were base camps of this revolution… People went from peace prayers to street protests with a serious Protestant manner, disarming reasonableness and discipline.”

(Photo: Werner Schulz, 22 July 2005/Arnd Wiegmann)

The gap in perception of 1989  emerged clearly at a forum I attended in eastern Berlin where the Gethsemane Church showed a film about its role in 1989 and invited comments from audience, which was about 2/3 Ossis (easterners) and 1/3 Wessis (westerners) who’d settled there since the government moved from Bonn in 1999.  One Wessi criticised a section on the “Round Table” — a church-moderated public panel that helped oversee the transition to democracy between December 1989 and March 1990 — as not lively enough to show the real drama of that period.

The Ossis promptly and unanimously disagreed. They found it thrilling to see clips of civil rights activists politely grilling once untouchable communist officials, uncovering their corruption and insisting they take responsibility for their misuse of power. This showed the new democracy in action, they said.

The film, Ende der Eiszeit (End of the Ice Age), also showed the central role of the churches in shielding the dissidents and encouraging them to embrace non-violence and transparency.  “Without the churches, this openness couldn’t have come about,” said Rev. Heinz-Otto Seidenschnur of the Gethsemane Church. A parish council member there, archeologist Ursula Kästner, said the church stepped into a vacuum to ensure a peaceful transition. “This was the church’s synodal principle at work,” she told me. “Otherwise, we would have had violence like in Romania.”

(Photo: St. Nicholas Church, 18 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Dieter Wendland, a graphic designer and veteran member of the parish council, said the phenomenon of packed churches burst like a balloon when the Wall opened. “On the first Sunday, almost all the pews were empty. About 10 people were sitting there and that was it. It was a bit depressing, but I said we’ve achieved what we were struggling for.  Now we can do the work we’re called to do, that is, organise church life and preach the Gospel.”

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

A government-backed mob in Vietnam about a week ago booted nearly 400 Buddhist monks and nuns out of a monastery in the centre of the country, bringing an apparent end to an ugly standoff with complicated origins. The incident has raised questions about the ruling Communist Party’s commitment to progress on religious freedom, but the Bat Nha Monastery narrative is much more complex than simply an “authoritarian government cracks down on the faithful” story.

(Photo: Thich Nhat Hanh at Non Nuoc pagoda north of Hanoi, 20 April 2007/Nguyen Huy Kham)

Some of the basic facts seem pretty straightforward. For nearly three years, the monks and nuns had lived at Bat Nha monastery in Lam Dong province, largely with the blessing of the local authorities via cooperation with local Buddhists, after their leader, the Vietnamese-born, French-based Buddhist zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, visited Vietnam in 2005 for the first time in 39 years. Last year, the local authorities started to put pressure on the followers of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village school of Buddhism. In late June of this year, electricity, water and phone services to the monastery were cut and a mob attacked the group to try to evict them, but they refused to leave. In July, a smaller mob attempted another attack. The government set Sept. 2 as a deadline for them to leave, but that date came and went. Then, on Sunday, Sept 27, the group’s overseas adherents reported that “an unidentified mob” of about 150 people, believed to include plain clothes policemen, violently evicted the 379 resident monastic followers of Thich Nhat Hanh.

(Photo: Monks pray at Dong Pagoda northeast of Hanoi, 26 Nov 2008/Nguyen Huy Kham)

The central government’s line has been that local Buddhists wanted Thich Nhat Hanh’s followers out of their monastery and the government had nothing to do with it. Asked about the incident, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga said in a statement it was “an internal issue between two groups of people following Buddhism at Bat Nha monastery. The dispute was non-violent, nobody was injured or detained.”

But Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village followers said police were involved in the eviction. A local government document from last month obtained by Thich Nhat Hanh’s followers and shown to Reuters stated that the group was not recognised by the state or the official Buddhist congregation and was staying at Bat Nha illegally. The roots of the problem may go back, in part at least, to Thich Nhat Hanh’s late 2007 visit to Vietnam. During that trip, he told Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet that the government should abolish the arm of the police that tracks religious groups and disband the government’s Religious Affairs Committee, which regulates religious activities.

Then, in early 2008, the annual journal of Plum Village proposed that the government abandon Communism, take the word Communist out of the name of the ruling political party and remove “Socialist” from the country’s official name, Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Although the comments may have been made with the interests of the Vietnamese nation in mind, they were resented by the religious police who, from that point on, pretty much had it in for Thich Nhat Hanh and his followers, a Plum Village document detailing the background of the incident said.

The local Bat Nha abbot, Thich Duc Nghi, first welcomed the Plum Village followers, but later appeared to sour on the group. Whether he did so because of pressure from the authorities or for his own reasons is unclear. The Plum Village followers believe he and the head of the religious police teamed up to bring down the Plum Village congregation, or sangha. He has stopped making public appearances, said Hong Kong-based Plum Villager Thich Phap Kham.

(Photo: President Triet at U.N. General Assembly, 25 Sept 2009/Patrick Andrade)

It is interesting to note that President Triet was in Communist ally Cuba when the Bat Nha evictions happened, just after a trip to New York for a United Nations Security Council meeting and a General Assembly debate. At least least two trials of Vietnamese political dissidents scheduled to take place when Triet was due to be in New York were postponed, possibly so that they would not be irritants when he was on American soil. It is also worth noting that in 2004, Vietnam chafed when it was placed on the U.S. State Department’s list of “countries of particular concern” on religious freedom, and took steps to be removed. Two years later, before President George W. Bush visited Vietnam, the State Department took Vietnam off that list, citing progress. The State Department’s 2008 human rights report on Vietnam issued this February noted improvements in respect for religious freedom, saying restrictions had been enforced less strictly than in previous years and participation in religious activities grew.

For now, the Plum Village monks and nuns are still crammed into Phuoc Hue temple in the town of Bao Loc where they have taken refuge. “We still do not know what will happen next, but the monks and nuns are determined to stay together to practice as a Sangha,” Thich Phap Kham said.

(Photo: Monk prays at Bai Dinh pagoda in Ninh Binh province, 17 May 2008/Nguyen Huy Kham)

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

The Cuban government has given permission for religious services to be held in the island’s prisons for the first time in 50 years, a church official has said.

The services will be allowed in all prisons where the inmates request them, said Marcial Miguel Hernandez, president of the Cuban Council of Churches.

(Photo: Combinado del Este men’s prison outside Havana, 31 March 2004/Claudia Daut)

“For us, it’s an expression and act of good faith by the Cuban authorities,” he told Reuters.

See the full story here.

Communist-ruled Cuba has slowly been warming to religion. President Raul Castro attended a Catholic beatification ceremony in Havana last November, a month after attending the opening of a Russian Orthodox church there. In February 2008, when Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone visited Cuba, Castro confirmed that an invitation to Pope Benedict extended by his ailing brother Fidel still stands.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

Could the Pope make a historic visit to commmunist Vietnam later this year?  A papal envoy hinted at this on Thursday, as Vietnam and the Vatican are seriously discussing establishing diplomatic ties. “This is my wish,” Vatican Undersecretary of State Monsignor Pietro Parolin told reporters when asked if he thought the Pope could visit the Southeast Asian country this year. He added that the question had not been discussed in meetings with the Foreign Ministry and government’s religious affairs committee.

(Photo: Priest outside a Hanoi court trying Catholics for illegal protests, 8 Dec 2008/stringer)

The papal envoy has been attending the first meeting of a joint working group on improving ties this week in Hanoi. He said the talks had made progress, but establishing ties was a process that will take time.

Roman Catholicism in Vietnam dates back centuries, even before French colonial rule. Now some 7 percent of mostly-Buddhist Vietnam’s population of 86 million are Catholic, making it one of the biggest Catholic communities in Asia.

Unlike in China, where the state keeps its thumb on religion through a Communist Party-backed “patriotic” church and organisations, there is no direct state intervention in Vietnam and Catholics are loyal to the Vatican.  That makes the Catholic church the largest organisation in Vietnam outside of the ruling Communist Party, which views the church as a threat to its monopoly on political power. The Vietnamese government keeps close tabs on religious organisations and curtails the activities of adherents.

Vietnam is one of only a handful of countries in the world with whom the Vatican does not have relations. In Asia, the others are China, North Korea, Laos, Malaysia and Myanmar.

(Photo: Newly ordained Hanoi Auxiliary Bishop Laurent Chu Van Minh blesses wellwishers, 5 Dec, 2008/Kham)

“Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century,” Tony Blair said on Thursday in a statement before Friday’s launch in New York of his new Faith Foundation to improve understanding between different religions and fight global poverty by mobilizing people through faith.

Blair is not the first person to talk about how important religion is and will be in the 21st century. Decades ago, the late French writer André Malraux reportedly went so far as to issue a wonderfully Gallic sweeping statement: “The 21st century will be religious or it will not be.”

Even if British understatement isn’t what it used to be, Blair’s comment is really quite bold. The main political ideologies of the 20th century were communism, Nazism and fascism. They rallied huge masses of people, justified totalitarian regimes and imposed skewed views of the world on whole populations. When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following the fall of the Berlin Wall, millions of people felt that they had been liberated.

I’m sure Blair doesn’t mean to evoke this negative aspect of the political ideologies that gripped the 20th century. He’s clearly thinking of the positive power of faith, as he explains in this interview in Time. Isn’t it clumsy, then, to compare religion to the ideologies of the 20th century?

The light being cast on China by the coming Summer Games is far brighter than the flickering Olympic flame now wending its way across that vast country. Politics, society, human rights, the status of Tibet and even the environment have been widely discussed.

Now a window has been opened on faith and religion in a country where six decades of Communist philosophy and rule might seem to have pushed those subjects into obscurity.

In a recent report the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has analyzed available surveys, some a few years old, and concluded that 31 percent of the Chinese population considers religion to be very or somewhat important in their lives, with only 11 percent rating it as meaningless. Even the exact starting time of the Summer Olympics is rooted in Confucianism and Chinese folk religions,  the report adds, where the numeral 8 is revered for its luck and power. The games will start on the 8th day of the 8th month of ‘08 at precisely 8 minutes and 8 seonds past 8 o’clock.

This does not mean that religious affiliation is high in China. Only one in five adults has an active connection, the report says, with one of the country’s five major religions — Buddhism (by far the largest single group), Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam and Taoism. That compares to 8 in every 10 adults in the United States who claim a religious affiliation.

But a recent report from East China Normal University in Shanghai appearing in state-approved media said that about 300 million Chinese over 16 — slghtly less than a third of the population in that age group — are religious, perhaps indicating the government has given recognition to the depth of religious sentiment.

The question is whether China’s modernization brought about by its economic engine will bring religion into society in a bigger way. The report notes that Hu Jintao, general secretary of the country’s Communist Party, earlier this year told the Chinese Politburo the leadedrship should try to “closely unite religious figures and believers … to build an all-around … prosperous society while quickening the pace toward the modernization of socialism.”

Photo credits: Reuters/Bobby Yip/David Gray

Remember ping-pong diplomacy, the exchange of ping-pong players between the United States and communist China in the 1970s that was one of the first steps that led to a thaw in relations between the two countries? If the Vatican had a ping-pong team, perhaps China would have considered sending their squad to the walled city in Rome for a match.

But the Vatican does not have a ping-pong team, as far as we know. So, the next best thing appears to be music. This week, Vatican Radio made a surprise announcement on its daily 2 p.m. bulletin. The China Philharmonic Orchestra of Beijing and the Shanghai Opera House Chorus will perform Mozart’s Requiem for Pope Benedict on May 7 in the Vatican’s audience hall, adding a stop to its already scheduled European tour.

As one diplomat said, “this could not have happened without the Beijing government approving it.” Given the fact that relations between the Vatican and Beijing have been scratchy to say the least, one can only wonder if this is the start of a mating game. It could lead to diplomatic relations and China’s recognition of the pope as leader of all Catholics in the world, including Chinese Catholics, many of whom have been forced to join the state-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Something seemed afoot in the last few months. In November, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, undersecretary for relations with states, was reported to have made a secret visit to China. The Vatican never denied the reports. In March, a Chinese delegation secretly had talks in the Vatican, sources confirmed.

One precedent for baton diplomacy that comes to mind is a similar event that happened in the Vatican on February 20, 1988 when the now mostly-forgotten Cold War still existed.

The then-Soviet Union’s Red Army Choir performed for Pope John Paul, singing, of all things, Ave Maria. It, too, was a shocker when it was announced. But on Dec 1, 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his historic visit to the Vatican, turning relations between the Kremlin and the Vatican on their head after some 70 years of mutual distrust. Relations between Russia and the Vatican were established in 1990 and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, if music be the food of diplomacy, play on.

Pope Benedict is just about the only world leader not to have said anything about the events in Tibet. This hasn’t gone unnoticed in Italy, where some commentators have been urging him to speak out — and others have been defending him for not doing so.

A story in the March 18 edition of Corriere della Sera quoted Antonio Socci, a Catholic writer and intellectual, as calling the Pope’s silence “the latest error by the Secretariat of State headed by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone“. In the same article, Giorgio Tonini, a member of the centre-left Democratic Party, said he was at first surprised that the Pope had not spoken out against the violence in Tibet during his Palm Sunday Mass. He said he later remembered reading a book by the the late Cardianl Agostino Casaroli, who was secretary of state for much of the reign of the late Pope John Paul. In the book, Casaroli spoke of the “martyrdom of patience” he had to go through when dealing with the communist countries of the former Soviet Bloc.

Not all commentators were critical. Andrea Riccardi, one of the founders of the Sant’ Egidio Community, said no one should expect the Vatican to “behave like a news agency” and react to every international crisis. Gian Maria Vian, editor-in-chief of the Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano, defended the Vatican’s prudence and said it was “premature” to start a polemic. The Pope could speak out about Tibet in the coming days, perhaps at Wednesday’s general audience or one of the events during Holy Week, Vian said in an interview with the Italian newspaper Liberal.

The Osservatore itself has run news reports on the events in Tibet, as has Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops conference.

Given the delicate relations between the Vatican and Beijing, it is no surprise that the Pope has been waiting before making any comment. Last year, a Vatican official told reporters in October that the Pope had scheduled a meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader living in exile, while he was on a visit to Italy. But on November 26, the Vatican did an about face and announced that “no audience is planned”. Between the time of the first announcement and the change of plans, Beijing had warned the Vatican that such a meeting would “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

Given the Vatican’s desire to improve its sometimes frosty relations with China, it’s a safe bet that when and if the Pope speaks out about Tibet, he will choose his words very carefully.

What do you think the Pope’s position on events on Tibet should be? Should there be an automatic solidarity among religious leaders in situations like this, or do other factors play into the decision about what to say?