News emerged this week that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, would be visiting Zimbabwe in October, and has requested a meeting with its president, Robert Mugabe.

It is brave decision and Williams is liable to be damned whatever he does: finger-wag Mugabe and he will almost certainly intensify the persecution of Christians in the country; fail to do so and he will be criticised as a coward or appeaser.

That said, it would have been almost as difficult for Williams to have been in the area – he is primarily going to Malawi to celebrate its 150th anniversary as an Anglican diocese – and not to have visited. Sure, opinion at home would have understood the omission (not least since prominent British figures have shunned the country for a decade, and his number two, in York, publicly cut up his dog collar in protest against the regime).

But, the Anglican flock on the ground – oppressed not only by Mugabe’s thugs but also now by the breakaway bishop, Nolbert Kunonga, whose loyalty to the president has allowed him to seize church property and expel clerics – would have seen Williams’ omission as deeply hurtful. And it is his flock’s needs, rather than UK public opinion, which will bother the Archbishop.

So, the visit is being pitched not as political but as pastoral, which, of course, it will be. But Williams’ knows as well as anyone that the pastoral is political.

There is a very good precedent for such a visit. One of John Paul II’s earliest pastoral trips, in June 1979, was to Poland, at the time labouring under a deeply unpopular, oppressive communist party. His visit was greeted with wild enthusiasm, worried the authorities, stiffened resistance, and helped galvanise the Solidarity movement; so much for a pastoral visit.

Rowan Williams is no John Paul II. He doesn’t have the latter’s legendary charisma, his church is nothing like as global in its presence, and, most significantly in this instance, he doesn’t hail from the country he is visiting. Nevertheless, his presence will be welcomed and celebrated by Anglicans, indeed by everyone who is suffering in Zimbabwe. And it is just possible that underlining the atrocious pastoral cost of Mugabe’s rule, to the world and to the president himself, the Archbishop may just open up some fissures in the regime.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos.