Paul Vallely: What may happen behind closed doors when Blair meets the Pope

Will the Prime Minister once more set out the 'moral case for war'? Will the pontiff reply with a stiff lecture? Something rather different could occur

On the face of it, Tony Blair's request for an audience with the Pope – which takes place in the Vatican this morning – doesn't make much sense. Which is why political pundits have found it hard to read, to the point of getting it preposterously wrong: one leader-writer suggested that Mr Blair was going there to pray that the UN will vote for a second resolution, that Britain's church leaders will change their mind and back the war and that the reservations of the million who marched for peace will evaporate.

Such talk just doesn't add up. Sources in the Vatican say that the audience was requested some time before the march revealed the scale of public opposition to war but long after it was clear that action against Iraq was in the offing. Tony Blair is therefore going knowing full well that he won't be changing the papal mind.

John Paul II has been stark in his views. "War is not inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity," he has repeatedly said. In our time every war is unjust because alternatives are available in the shape of "international law, honest dialogue, solidarity between states, [and] the noble exercise of diplomacy". The Pope's prime minister, the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, has said that the West has the right to defend itself, but it has the obligation to do so morally. Cardinal James Francis Stafford, the highest-ranking US cardinal in the Roman Curia, has said that Mr Bush's threat to use nuclear weapons is "unworthy of the oldest representative democracy in the world" and added that "the US government has compromised its own basic principles by implicitly endorsing torture since 11 September."

And that's just in public. In private they have talked about "a new barbarism", an "accelerating spiral of fear and brutality" and asked plainly: "Have you guys forgotten Vietnam?" and "Do you really want a billion Muslims set against you?" When two prominent right-wing Catholic intellectuals, George Weigel and Michael Novak, recently attempted to use just war theory to defend the legitimacy of a pre-emptive attack on Iraq (Novak even went to Rome to make the case), they were peremptorily dismissed with the line, "If every country which feels threatened attacks first, there will be war without end on the entire planet." Tony Blair knows he is never going to win the Pope round.

So what is Mr Blair expecting to happen after he is ushered into the papal library and all the officials withdraw after the introductions leaving the two men alone together? "Perhaps," one Vatican insider told me this week, "he will simply want to justify himself, and the Pope will want to discover, when all language of diplomacy and bluff is stripped away, what is his real intention?"

But there is another possibility. There is a strict protocol to papal audiences for politicians. Routinely they are limited to 15 minutes, to avoid jealous comparisons. But Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy (and a Chaldean Catholic) was last week given 30 minutes while the Pope pressed Iraq to comply with UN resolutions. The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, got almost 40 minutes. Behind the scenes Vatican diplomacy is moving full-scale. Rome recently sent to Baghdad one of its senior troubleshooters, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray – the Basque Frenchman who helped negotiate the end to the Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem last Christmas, and who has met Saddam before – with a personal letter for the Iraqi dictator. Aziz brought the reply.

"The Vatican has a very specific read on all this," another insider said. "Those at the top are convinced after Etchegaray's visit that, with good will on both sides, this can be resolved without war. They also think that aggression without the blessing of the UN would torpedo the entire international legal structure so painfully put in place since the Second World War. They feel containment is painful but it's producing results – and that you have to have far stronger evidence than Bush has for overriding the presumption in favour of peace and against war."

Mr Blair is not likely to get the papal lecture some predict. In these situations the Pope frequently just listens and then asks a few very pointed questions. "He's sharp – this crisis has concentrated his mind so that he looks better than he has done for years – and he'll be well-briefed," one Vatican official said. "He'll encourage Blair to try to think about the problem another way." He is bound to raise the Palestine issue, as he did with Kofi Annan; "it's very near the top of his mind". And he may well offer the use of the Vatican's secure channels of communication to Saddam. The diplomatic skill of the Curia should not be under- estimated; there are many who believe that the Pope should take a large share of the credit for helping to convince President Bush to take his case against Iraq to the UN Security Council.

There is something about the Pope, those close to him say, which allows the most cautious individuals to talk very frankly in private. People open their hearts about their innermost worries and their deepest intentions. Dialogues of a very unusual kind can take place. It is a place to tell the truth. But it can also mean, as Mr Blair may discover to his cost, that you can come out feeling even more troubled than when you went in.