Pope's apolitical vision of Middle East

Pope Benedict XVI will travel to Lebanon on September 14-16, marking his first visit to the Middle East since the Arab Spring and his fourth overall to the region (after Turkey in 2006, the Holy Land in 2009 and Cyprus in 2010). 

It's also the closest he's likely to get to the current chaos in Syria, writes John Allen in NCR Online.

The official purpose is to present the conclusions from the Vatican's Synod on the Middle East in October 2010. 

Lebanon is an obvious launching pad, since Christians make up roughly 40 percent of the country's total population of four million, the largest Christian footprint in percentage terms in the Middle East. 

It's also, of course, one of the few places in the region where the pope's safety can be reasonably assured.

While current events form the subtext to the trip, anyone hoping for high political drama probably should prepare for disappointment.

If things hold to form, Benedict XVI seems unlikely to outline a bold new vision for the Arab world, nor to strike a sharply defined stance on Syria, even if the present carnage is somehow still unfolding. 

 Instead, the trip shapes up as an experiment in whether Benedict's basically "apolitical" vision of the Christian future in the Middle East has legs.

In that light, Benedict in 2012 should offer a sharp contrast to John Paul II in 1997, the last time a pope travelled to Lebanon. 

The country was then under Syrian occupation, and Christians were seen as the bulwark of the resistance.

During a massive open-air Mass in Beirut, the head of Lebanon's Maronite Church at the time, the legendary Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, compared the situation to that of Poland's Catholics under the Soviets, invoking Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski's heroic defiance of Communist rule. 

 John Paul encouraged the analogy, welcoming opposition leaders to his events and explicitly endorsing the aspirations of Lebanese youth to "freedom, sovereignty and independence."

The take-away for Lebanese Christians was that John Paul wanted them to play a major role in the affairs of state, and they proceeded to do just that.

Fifteen years later, Benedict XVI will probably deliver a different message. 

His counsel, albeit voiced mostly by example rather than explicit instructions, will likely be to avoid partisan politics, focusing on a humanitarian role as reconcilers, peace-makers and dispensers of charity across sectarian and ideological divides.