COMMENT Not since John Foster Dulles refused to be photographed with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva peace conference in the mid-1950s has a snubbed photo opportunity by the Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur at Castel Gondolfo on Monday - if it comes to pass - be invested with reverberating importance.

Surely, this is hyperbolic exaggeration?

Not really, given the resonance of subtle gesture struck by no less than Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace two days ago when receiving Prime Minister Najib Razak and wife in audience.

In a move that has set tongues wagging and raised the pantomime of non-verbal diplomacy to transcendent heights, the British monarch was attired in yellow, the colour of the much-repressed Bersih-organised 'March for Democracy' on Kuala Lumpur's streets last week that is fast turning out to be the biggest public relations disaster of an already gaffe-prone Najib administration.

Seriously, at this late stage, nobody expects Murphy Pakiam, the Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur, to opt out of Najib's delegation which will be hosted by Pope Benedict XVI to a visit at the latter's summer residence outside Rome on Monday.

A delicate feat of evasion

By agreeing to be part of Najib's delegation to call on the Pope, in what is being billed as a precursor to the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Malaysia, was an error of judgement by Pakiam - he should have opted to go on his own, without officially being a member of the PM's team.

But if he is seen in the inevitable photo opportunities that would be generated by the audience - pictures the PM's media boosters would go to town with - the Archbishop would convert a faux pas into a pratfall.

In other words, he ought to do a quick take on Dulles at Geneva at the 1955 peace talks on Indochina.

The American secretary of state had declined to be photographed shaking Zhou's hand at the conference in a snub that reinforced the Bamboo Curtain which descended between China and the United States following the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949.

It was a gesture that doomed relations between the two countries. It took Henry Kissinger's Ping Pong diplomacy two decades after to start healing the breach.

Murphy must avoid being seen in any of the photos that would be taken and circulated of the Pope Benedict-Najib encounter.

This is going to be a delicate feat of evasion; his being part of the PM's delegation and then not in it, at the critical moment when the cameras start clicking.

His absence at the crucial scenes when diplomacy can be exploited for political agitprop would be regarded as a gesture of solidarity with the thousands who marched under the Bersih banner last Saturday.

The Rosa Parks of Malaysia

Among them was Anne Ooi, who has since been dubbed 'Lady of Liberty' - the gray-haired grandmother, nonchalant before the hail of tear gas and chemical-laced water cannons of the men in blue whose lockdown of Kuala Lumpur failed to deter thousands like her.

Anne has now become an iconic figure, the 'Rosa Parks' of the movement for electoral reform in Malaysia. (Rosa Parks was the African-American woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white man in a bus triggered the famous Montgomery bus boycott that launched Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign in America in the mid-1950s).

Anne is one of many Catholics who braved daunting police cordons to support Bersih's call for electoral reform.

Many of them, in spontaneous defiance of a ham-fisted Najib government, decided that this was one time they should put into practice what the Church likes to call a "preferential option for the poor (meaning the oppressed)."

Since last Saturday's international media-covered event, local web news portals have been filled with stirring first-person accounts of many Christians who simply felt they had to march to press for more transparency to the democratic process in Malaysia.

From that standpoint, it would seem incongruous if the titular head of Catholics in Kuala Lumpur, the epicenter of the Bersih-organised march, ignores the need to make a point in the way Queen Elizabeth had seemingly sought to do at Buckingham Palace on Thursday when PM Najib came a-calling.

Every weekend the pulpits in churches resound with the imploration that the faithful must practice what scripture somewhere exhorts that "justice must roll down like the waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream".

Archbishop Murphy Pakiam (right), recipient of the honorifics 'Datuk' and 'Tan Sir' in rapid succession during the brief span of his prelature (2003-), a situation at variance to predecessor Soter Fernandez's quiet refusal of the titles because of a lack of belief that this would lead to better church-government relations, must now step up to the plate and decline to be used as fodder for propaganda.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent. Malaysiakini

Bishop's place in Najib's team to Vatican unseemly