1991.

Certainly Lebanon seemed to return the pope's graciousness. Even Hezbollah, seen in the West as a terrorist organization but which functions here as a political and social movement, got in on the act, erecting a banner along the pope's route in from the airport welcoming him in French "to the country of co-existence." (Another banner, in Arabic, welcomed Benedict to "the country of resistance," generally a reference to perceived Israeli hegemony.)

Despite the overall conciliatory touch, Benedict didn't shrink from flinging down a few gauntlets.

One came for his Christian hosts, with Benedict asking them "to continue to hope" and asking them "not to leave" the Middle East and "not to sell their possessions."

That plea comes against the backdrop of a decades-long decline in the Christian presence in the region.link the deprival of religious liberty to Christian flight from the Middle East, warning that the long-standing decline in the region's Christian footprint means "human, cultural, and religious impoverishment."

"A Middle East without Christians, or with only a few Christians, would no longer be the Middle East," the pope said, calling on political leaders to avoid the advent of a "monochromatic Middle East" without religious diversity.

That language came in a document titled Ecclesia in Medio Oriente ("The Church in the Middle East"), representing the conclusions of a 2010 Synod of Bishops in Rome on the Middle East. The pope signed that document, known as an apostolic exhortation, during a ceremony in a Greek Melkite basilica in Beirut this evening.

Benedict insisted that religious freedom is not an idea unique to