Vatican barters with Russia for papal visit

The Vatican is using a 16th-century icon that is one of the holiest objects in Orthodox Russia as a bargaining chip in the attempt to secure a visit to Russia by Pope John Paul II.

Polish media reported yesterday that the pontiff hoped to stop at the end of August in Kazan, the capital of the republic of Tatarstan, 800 km (500 miles) east of Moscow, en route to his first visit to Mongolia.

The Vatican's press office neither confirmed nor denied the reports and indicated that intense talks were taking place behind the scenes to overcome bitter Russian Orthodox opposition to a papal visit.

The Pope is known to view a "pilgrimage" to Russia as the biggest prize to elude him in the past 25 years.

As the first Slav Pope, he devoted much of the first half of his papacy defeating communism in the largely Slav countries of eastern Europe.

The bargaining tool is the ruby and gold-encrusted icon known as the Kazan Mother of God, which is credited with saving Russia from Napoleon and with driving Polish conquerors out of Moscow in the 17th century.

The Pope has been in possession of it for a decade. He is believed to want it returned but the price is said to be Russian Orthodox assent to his visit.

"The appropriate occasion and the way of delivering [the icon] will be evaluated at the appropriate time," Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman, said.

The Russian patriarch, Alexy II, has long been a bitter opponent of what he perceives to be the Vatican's proselytising ambitions in the former Soviet Union.

Two years ago when the Pope visited Ukraine, the cradle of Slav Christianity, to talk of Christian "unity", Alexy denounced the pontiff as "an unwelcome guest".

Since then, Catholic priests have been barred or expelled from Russia and the building of some Catholic churches prevented. But over the past few years, senior officials from Tatarstan have been received in the Vatican for negotiations on the return of the icon.

It stems from at least 1579 when, according to Russian Orthodox legend, the Virgin Mary appeared in an apparition to a nine-year-old girl in Kazan, instructing her to retrieve the icon from the ashes of the family home, which had just been burned down.

At least two copies of the icon were made. It is believed that the Pope has the original, though this claim remains contentious.