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Good morning. Earlier this week on the Today programme, Labour MP and surgeon Rosena Allin-Khan spoke of her time among Rohingya refugees who had fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh. She used the word genocide as she described the appalling stories of rape, torture and murder that she’d heard. Pope Francis is due to visit Myanmar and Bangladesh at the end of this month. Some church authorities in Myanmar have urged him to avoid using the highly politicised term Rohingya, for fear of inflaming tensions and worsening the trauma of the country’s Muslim minority. Others argue that he shouldn’t go at all, since any attempt at intervention on behalf of the victims could not only make things worse for them but could also result in punitive action against the country’s small Christian minority. Meanwhile, the Vatican has announced that Pope Francis will meet the head of the Myanmar army and Rohingya refugees, as well as Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Pope Francis’s Jesuit formation means that he’s committed to a process of patient discernment and dialogue in his style of leadership. His willingness to meet with Myanmar’s military leaders as well as with the refugees is I believe a powerful example of the importance he attaches to dialogue in acknowledging conflict and seeking reconciliation. His predecessor Pope John Paul II once said that ‘Humanity should question itself … about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.’ Dialogue and negotiation militate against a certain sense of moral indignation and urgency. It’s hard not to be consumed by a desire for immediate and effective action when one hears of what’s happening to the Rohingya people, even as we’re at a loss as to what that action might be. In reality, the quest for peace wends its way through a frustratingly slow and painful process of dialogue with all its imperfections and compromises. As Pope Francis well knows, that means accepting that the solutions we arrive at will be less than ideal, and there will be room for legitimate criticism on all sides. Yet dialogue is not about endorsing violence but about recognising that every conflict has people on all sides who feel wronged. There will never be a just and enduring peace if the protection of one is achieved by the destruction or humiliation of the other.