— for Cak Nur

ONE day, so the story goes, Stalin asked, "So, how many battalions does the Vatican have?"

The Vatican, as we know, has only a few hundred Swiss Guards assigned to guard the Pope. The entire Vatican is only 44 hectares, smaller than the Mall in Washington, DC; its annual budget is around US$500 million, only 25 percent of the budget of Harvard University.

Yet when the old man sitting there died and was