With the same relativistic three-body theory which reproduces the pion-deuteron elastic and breakup differential cross sections, it is also possible to explain the energy and angular dependence of the reaction parameters iT n and t 2 o throughout the region of the 3,3 resonance. This theory differs from other models in that it treats relativistically not only the space variables but also the spin variables and it has a much smaller contribution from pion absorption.PACS numbers: 25.80. Dj, 24.70.+s, 25.10.+s Presently, the theoretical and experimental situation of polarized pion-deuteron scattering can be said to be one of considerable confusion. On the theoretical side, the predictions from various groups differ greatly, mainly as a result of the particular way in which they treat the pion-absorption channel, 1 " 4 although other problems arise if they include relativistic kinematics for the three particles 1,3 or only the pion. 2 Also, even though for polarization reactions the spin degrees of freedom are the most relevant variables, all of these models treat the spin nonrelativistically; that is, they assume that a spinor in a given reference frame looks the same when it is observed from another reference frame. From the experimental side, the early data 5,6 for the vector analyzing power /T n contained strong oscillations which were interpreted as dibaryon resonance signals, 7,8 although in a new comprehensive set of measurements this oscillatory behavior has now disappeared. 9 In the case of the tensor polarization t 20 , two different groups have measured contradictory sets of data at 7^ = 140 MeV and 100° < 0 n < 180°; Holt and coworkers 10,11 found that t 20 was negative with values of t 2 o 0.4, while Gruebler and co-workers 12,13 found that t 20 was strongly oscillatory with values of 0< t 20 <0.6, an d where again the strong oscillations were interpreted as a dibaryon resonance signal. Finally, a recent set of measurements of t 2 o at four energies 14 found the interesting result that if the calculations were performed including pion absorption, they did not fit the data, while the theoretical results looked quite reasonable if pion absorption was neglected. I will try in the following to clarify this present situation of confusion.In two previous Letters 15,16 I have described a relativistic three-body model and have used it successfully to explain the elastic and breakup differential cross sections in the region of the 3,3 resonance. In this model, the relativistic Faddeev equations are solved with the pion-nucleon interaction represented by the six S-and P-wave channels and the nucleon-nucleon interaction by the two S-wave channels. It assumes separable T matrices tip, p'\s) = g(p)T(s)g(p') which are normalized to the experimental phase shifts and inelasticities and are extended to the off-shell region by means of form factors gip) : =p l /ia 2 + p 2 ), where a is taken to be 1 GeV/cfor the pion-nucleon channels 17 " 19 and equal to the Yamaguchi values 20 for the nucleon-nucleon channels after t...