ROME — Pope Francis received a special plea this month in the Vatican from Cardinal Charles Maung Bo of Myanmar, where the Pope will make his 21st, and perhaps most politically perilous, foreign trip beginning Monday (Nov 27).

Don’t say “Rohingya”.

“It is a very contested term, and the military and government and the public would not like him to express it,” Cardinal Bo said in an interview during which he avoided using the word, referring only to Muslims who are suffering in Rakhine state.

He said he had urged the Pope to focus on the woes of the Muslim minority in “a way that doesn’t hurt anybody” and suggested that using the word they call themselves could set back the pursuit of peace.

The Rohingya are persecuted and stateless Muslims in western Myanmar who are — according to the United Nations, the United States and much of the global community — the victims of ethnic cleansing, mass murder and systematic rape at the hands of the Myanmar military and extremist monks.

Pope Francis has said the word in the past, denouncing the “persecution of our Rohingya brothers”, whom he has said were being “tortured and killed, simply because they uphold their Muslim faith”.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, which the Pope will visit after Myanmar, where they live in sprawling refugee camps as they await a repatriation deal between the two countries.

The Rohingya are, in short, exactly the sort of persecuted and downtrodden people in the global periphery whose rights Pope Francis has made it his pastoral mission to champion and whose plight he has used his papal platform to elevate.

The Myanmar trip would seem to present the Pope an opportunity to reassert his status as the world’s moral compass by condemning the violence against the Rohingya. Many hope he will do just that.

But Cardinal Bo said that Pope Francis had gotten the message.

“He understands better now the situation,” Cardinal Bo said.

The situation, as it were, is a political, sectarian and religious minefield that some supporters of Pope Francis worry, poses a no-win scenario even for a political operator as deft as he is.

The Pope “risks either compromising his moral authority or putting in danger the Christians of that country”, the Reverend Thomas Reese, a commissioner of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which listed Myanmar as one of the worst countries in that category, wrote this past week in a column for the Religion News Service.

“I have great admiration for the Pope and his abilities, but someone should have talked him out of making this trip,” he wrote.

Rev Reese argued that the Pope’s usual, and admirable, willingness to call out injustice could put the country’s Christian minority in grave danger.

About 700,000 Roman Catholics live in Myanmar, representing little more than 1 per cent of the total population. There are also Baptist Christians and Hindus, but the vast majority in the country, about 90 per cent, follow Theravada Buddhism, and the campaign against the Rohingya is wildly popular.

On the other hand, Rev Reese said of the Pope: “If he is silent about the persecution of the Rohingya, he loses moral credibility.”

The Vatican spokesman, Mr Greg Burke, said in a briefing this past week that Rohingya was “not a prohibited word”, adding that, while the pope takes the advice of Cardinal Bo seriously, “we’ll see together” whether the Pope uses the word.

“Let’s just say it’s very interesting diplomatically,” he said.

Many Buddhists consider the Rohingya, who have lived in Myanmar for generations and were stripped of their citizenship in 1982, trespassers and terrorists.

In October, Rohingya militants attacked and killed nine border officials, prompting a crackdown that has shocked rights activists the world over for its cruelty. If the pope appears to take sides with the Rohingya, he risks angering extremist monks who have warned the pope to steer clear.

“There is no Rohingya ethnic group in our country, but the pope believes they are originally from here. That’s false,” Mr Ashin Wirathu, leader of a hardline Buddhist movement, Ma Ba Tha, told The News Times in August.

The reputational cost of silence on the persecution on the Rohingya is already being paid by Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Once the darling of rights activists during her years under house arrest, Ms Suu Kyi was elected in 2015 with the goal of putting Myanmar on the path to stable democracy and settling disputes with the country’s many armed ethnic groups.

But the military maintained control of the national security infrastructure, and Ms Suu Kyi appears to have no power, and no voice, to stop the attacks on the Rohingya.

Cardinal Bo, an ally of Ms Suu Kyi’s, has argued that she remains the country’s best hope for democracy and that the pope, who is scheduled to meet her Tuesday in the capital, Naypyitaw, should show his support in the hopes of giving her more leverage to sway the military.

But, according to the Vatican, Cardinal Bo also suggested that Pope Francis meet General Min Aung Hlaing, commander of Myanmar’s powerful military.

The meeting on Thursday is intended to make sure the military leader does not feel forgotten, but it also presents the Pope’s greatest opportunity to have an impact on the humanitarian situation.

In Myanmar, Pope Francis will seek out meetings with the persecuted. On Tuesday, he is to meet with representatives of religious minorities, including Hindus, Christians and what Mr Burke, the Vatican spokesman, called a “small group” of Rohingya refugees.

On Thursday, the Pope will go to Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have sought safety. Some are to meet with the Pope that day in Dhaka, the capital.

But experts in the church are urging the pope to be careful what he calls them.

The Rev Bernardo Cervellera, a member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions and editor of AsiaNews, an organisation based in Rome that closely follows the church in Asia, said the pope’s previous use of the word Rohingya made Christians in Myanmar “very very worried”.

Rev Cervellera also said he thought that using the word could play into the hands of Muslim extremists, including Al-Qaeda, who he said had started a holy war to save the Rohingya.

“The word is politicised and monopolised by an Islamic idea,” Rev Cervellera said, adding that the military was carrying out ethnic cleansing of all the minorities in the region. “But the world only talks about Rohingya,” he said.

The question remains if, and how, the Pope will do so.

Having made his case to the pontiff, even Cardinal Bo sought to soften the blow should Pope Francis speak the Rohingya’s name.

“If the pope were to mention it, it wouldn’t mean anything involved in politics,” like extending citizenship, Cardinal Bo said. “He will not interfere with that. He will just say to have concern for the suffering people.” THE NEW YORK TIMES