The Pope's encounter with young people in Australia seems to be taking on the air of a Conservative rally. If so, it was an apt sequel to the way in which Benedict some weeks ago had repaid the cordial welcome President George Bush had given him in the US. When the Pope hosted Bush at the Vatican, he followed an unprecedented protocol. The two of them went for a private walk together in the magnificent gardens, and then stopped for a meditative pause in front of a replica of the Lourdes Grotto. Inevitably, the paparazzi recalled that Bush's brother, the Governor of Florida and his friend, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had both become Catholics. I know you make no claim to being a Vaticanologist, but were you not tempted this time to speculate on what the Pope might have had to say to the President?

Indeed, even someone who like me is not addicted to Pope-watching cannot imagine that the topic of the near total disruption of Christian life in Iraq was not a cross-point of the thoughts, if not the talk, of both men.

They know that the military invasion was accompanied by another assault force: American evangelists out to conquer the Iraqi market. As usual, hot-gospelling is borne aloft on the wings of charitable aid. The best known organisation engaged in both is Samaritan's Purse, run by Franklin Graham, son of the famous crowd-pulling evangelist, Billy Graham.

As a result, in the past five years, about 20 new American neo-Evangelical churches have been set up in Iraq, with three or four of them around the Dominican Cathedral of St Joseph in the Karrada quarter of Baghdad.

These missionaries are having a doubly negative effect on the traditionally Christian communities that have almost miraculously survived there since Apostolic times. On one hand, because the newcomers amalgamate the images 'American' and 'Christian', they have intensified the antagonism of Muslim Iraqis against the old Iraqi Christians. On the other, they use their superior resources, in terms of security and finance, to recruit adepts from the older established but now tragically harassed churches.

I imagine the Pope and the President explored other ways besides prayer by which the Iraqi Christians could be helped to avoid the total extermination that is imminently menacing them. Perhaps all of us should be doing the same.

Do you think that Pope and President could have drawn inspiration from the 'holy garden' setting, about how to promote non-aggressive forms of Christian witness, while still appreciating the positive aspects of the 'back to basics' tendency in neo-Conservative and even honestly fundamentalist movements?

The word 'fundamentalist' is nowadays being bandied about very loosely. I was often reminded of its original reference to the supposed roots of national identity, during the tribute to Francis Ebejer at the Arts Festival... What would the author of the play Bloody In Bolivia have said, I asked myself, had he heard Evo Morales, an Aymara by blood, at his installation as President in 2006, tell his brother Indians (62 per cent of the population) that, after five centuries of marginalisation, they were now in for five centuries of supremacy?

'Fundamentalist' is an epithet also applied among so many others to the radically Orthodox group, Laikos orthodoxos synagermas (LAOS), that had 10 candidates elected to the Greek Parliament at the last election in 2007. Yet they do not have much in common with the Bolivian nationalists.

Certainly not all fundamentalists are totalitarian. There are even Islamists of the calibre of Youssouf al-Qaradawy, president of the European Council of the Fatwa, who holds that sharia logically requires democracy.

Of course, democracy itself can take as great a variety of shapes as fundamentalism. We should recognise that the best shape for it to take depends on the environment. That may have been even why Pope Benedict, deliberately or otherwise, decided to have his conversation with Mr Bush in an ecologically inspiring garden setting, rather than in the habitual, closed, very Western-style space allotted for audiences.

Are you implying that there is a running thread between the 'environmental art'/Teilhardian spirituality and the 'political theology' that you have been promoting on different occasions?

The most apt answer to that question is, I suspect, on display at the entrance of the Ministry of Tourism now housing a splendid Richard England/Patrick Fenech exhibition (incidentally England had made a notable contribution to the architectural renewal of Baghdad and the exhibition catalogue is prefaced by Rijat Chadiji himself). It is one of Myriam England's amazing Christian Ikebana inventions. Her masterly expression of faith - in flowers and sticks and jars - shows how any place, even if not the Vatican gardens, nor a cuddly and thornless environment, can be turned into a nursery in which a cosmic spirituality imbued with deep theology can be made to permeate architectural/political discourse.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Nadya Fiott.