The Pope’s performance in Myanmar will rank as a case-study in diplomatic finesse. He was suitably wary of not using the word “Rohingya” in course of his keynote address in Naypidaw in the company of his host Aung San Suu Kyi, who has tacitly condoned the renewed hostilities against the ethnic group over the past three months. It may be sheer coincidence that the Oxford City Council has stripped the “icon of democracy” of the Freedom of Oxford award in parallel with Pope Francis’ visit. A resounding papal condemnation would then have been a double whammy for Suu Kyi. Of course the collective name of the “nowhere men” is as politically charged as it has an emotional connotation.

In the net, the Papacy’s reference to the crackdown was at best general, at worst a calibrated evasion of horrendous reality. He has advanced a spirited appeal for the “rights of all in Myanmar” in a remarkably oblique reference to what the United Nations has called a “textbook campaign of ethnic cleansing”. The world expected the Pope to be a little more explicit; there was no call for a guarded response to the almost relentless persecution since August.

There is little doubt that the comity of nations is disappointed as must be the Rohingyas themselves ~ the message of the Dove that flew in from the Vatican to a tormented swathe of the world has been diluted. Lost is the opportunity afforded by what had been packaged as a landmark visit. Not that the Pope has never used the term. In the past, he is on record as having denounced what he called “the persecution of our Rohingya brothers who were being tortured and killed, simply because they uphold their Muslim faith”. He had hit the bull’s eye while in the Vatican; not so however while in Myanmar. Clearly, there was no previous hedging of grim reality. On Tuesday, the world was witness to dodgy diplomacy.

Having said that, it is hard not to wonder whether the Pope was acutely aware that he was wading a political and diplomatic minefield. Perhaps he was, in the perspective of Naypidaw’s equation with the Vatican not least because of the Christian segment in Myanmar. The visit has reaffirmed that the primary role of the Pope is as the leader of the Roman Catholic community.

Ergo, the first people he must protect are his own. Reports in the immediate aftermath of his presentation do suggest that his representative in Myanmar, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, had warned him that if he used the word “Rohingya” ~ a predominantly Muslim group ~ he might compromise the position of the country’s Catholic minority. Pope Francis therefore may have had no option but to rein himself in, and surrender the larger cause of humanity at the altar of Catholicism. The Rohingyas thus find themselves, once again, between the lines.