Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy walked into the papal library in July 1963 with millions of Americans holding their breath.

Reporters, eager to prove that the Vatican controlled the first Catholic president, watched to see whether he would kneel before Pope Paul VI and kiss the Fisherman’s Ring.

Had he done so, Protestant voters back home might have sworn the Vatican had a spare key to the Oval Office.

Instead, Kennedy rose, offered a firm handshake, and ended the suspense. In seconds, he sent a message ten policy papers could not: the Vatican does not run the White House.

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Later, he joked to an aide that the gesture would win him “a lot of votes in South Carolina.”

61 years later, the same question lands on President Bola Tinubu. Today (Sunday), he joins other heads of state in St Peter’s Basilica for the installation of Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a Chicago-born Augustinian who survived Lagos traffic and pepper-soup dinners while serving as a young diplomat at the Apostolic Nunciature in the 1980s.

 

In the days leading up to the visit, the Vatican sent a letter rich with warmth. “Your great nation is dear to me,” the new pope wrote, urging Tinubu to attend “at this moment of particular importance for the Catholic Church and a world afflicted by conflict.”

The polite request could be hiding a blunt question: will you kiss my ring?

 

The ring, Anulus Piscatoris, began as the Pope’s signet, pressing red wax to seal documents with St Peter’s authority.

By the late Middle Ages, visitors were expected to kneel, grasp the papal hand, and kiss the ring as a pledge of loyalty.

Over time, the act drifted from diplomatic ritual to courtly show. Monarchs, envoys and, in the Instagram age, adventurous tourists all line up to do it.

Popes Pius X and Paul VI tried to downplay the pageantry. Then came Pope Francis.

 

In March 2019, he went viral for pulling his hand away from a stream of kissers faster than a danfo driver dodging LASTMA.

He did it so quickly that one might liken it to a cat’s reflex. News outlets dubbed it the “hand-kiss recoil.”

“It was a simple question of hygiene,” wrote Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti, who said the Pope was worried about germs.

Yet, like all good Argentine telenovelas, the plot twisted when Nigeria’s former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, visited the Vatican in 2014.

The Holy Father gladly offered his hand, and ‘Mama Peace’ sealed the bilateral relations with her lips. It seems the minimalist Pope knows when tradition suits diplomacy.

 

Why does any of this matter to 220 million Nigerians? Well, President Tinubu is not travelling as the Asiwaju of Bourdillon.

He appears in Rome as the plenipotentiary of the largest Black nation, home to roughly 35 million Catholics, the second-largest Catholic population in Africa after the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nigeria and the Holy See have maintained formal ties since 1976. Vatican officials view Nigeria as a “swing state” in global Catholicism: a flawed yet functioning laboratory of Christian-Muslim coexistence and, sadly, a frequent source of martyrdom statistics.

 

Tinubu’s gesture, therefore, counts. Kneel or kiss the ring, and critics may claim the self-styled City Boy has yielded sovereignty to a city-state barely bigger than Lekki Phase I.

Offer only a handshake, and conservative Catholics could tweet that he snubbed St Peter’s successor. Expect #TinubuSnubsPope. You heard it here first.

 

Tinubu already bows to business titan Aminu Dantata and recently lowered his head to be crowned Dike si mba Anambra.

No one cried treason. Yet the papal ring feels different: kiss it, and some see submission; refuse, and others see arrogance. Neither interpretation may be accurate, yet both can become memes.

The good news? Protocol is on Tinubu’s side. Modern Vatican etiquette allows heads of state to bow slightly and shake hands; the kiss is optional. Barack Obama shook. Emmanuel Macron shook. The Queen wore gloves and curtsied.

On the other hand, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro planted a theatrical kiss, and nobody mistook him for a papal puppet, though, granted, they mistook him for many other things.

 

So what should Tinubu do? A modest bow, then a firm handshake. The bow honours Peter’s heir; the handshake signals that Nigeria and the Vatican are sovereign equals.

Or, he could invent a Yoruba-Vatican hybrid salute we can all debate on TV Monday morning.

If Tinubu leans in to kiss the ring and, God forbid, the Pope, channelling the Francis in his middle name, retracts his hand, the President must not insist.

His army of spokesmen will have a hard time explaining a viral clip of two old men playing tug-of-war with a ruby ring.

 

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Stephen Angbulu