A meeting decades in the making
Pope Francis, Iraqi ayatollah al-Sistani set to make history
BAGHDAD — In Iraq’s holiest city, a pontiff will meet a revered ayatollah and make history with a message of coexistence in a place plagued by bitter divisions.
One is the chief pastor of the worldwide Catholic Church, the other a preeminent figure in Shiite Islam whose opinion holds powerful sway on the Iraqi street and beyond. Their encounter will resonate across Iraq, even crossing borders into neighboring, mainly Shiite Iran.
Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are to meet Saturday for at most 40 minutes, part of the time alone except for interpreters, in the Shiite cleric’s modest home in the city of Najaf. Every detail was scrutinized ahead of time in painstaking, behind-thescenes preparations that touched on everything from shoes to seating arrangements.
The geopolitical undertones weigh heavy on the meeting, along with twin threats from a pandemic and ongoing tensions with rocket-firing Iranian-backed rogue groups.
For Iraq’s dwindling Christian minority, a show of solidarity from al-Sistani could help secure their place in Iraq after years of displacement — and, they hope, ease intimidation from Shiite militiamen against their community.
Iraqi officials in government, too, see the meeting’s symbolic power — as does Tehran.
The 90-year-old al-Sistani has been a consistent counterweight to Iran’s influence. With the meeting, Francis, 84, is recognizing him as the chief interlocutor
of Shiite Islam over his rival, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. News of the meeting heightened long-standing rivalries between the Shiite seminaries of Najaf and Iran’s city of Qom over which stands as center of the Shiite world.
“It will be a private visit without precedent in history, and it will not have an equal to any previous visits,” said a religious official in Najaf, involved in the planning.
For the Vatican, it was a meeting decades in the making, one that eluded Francis’ predecessors.
“Najaf did not make it easy,” said one Christian religious official close to the planning from the Vatican side, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the visit’s delicacy.
In December, Louis Sako, the patriarch of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic Church told The Associated Press the church was trying to schedule
a meeting between Francis and the ayatollah. It was included in the first draft of the program, “but when the (Vatican) delegation visited Najaf, there were problems,” he said, without elaborating. The church kept insisting. “We know the importance and impact of Najaf in the Iraqi situation,” Sako said. What value would the pope’s message of coexistence in Iraq have, they determined, if he did not seek the support of its most powerful and respected religious figure?
Sako finally confirmed the meeting in January, weeks after the pontiff ’s itinerary had been assembled.
Rarely does al-Sistani weigh in on governance matters. When he has, it has shifted the course of Iraq’s modern history.
An edict from him provided many Iraqis reason to participate in the January 2005 elections, the first after the 2003 U.S.-led
invasion. His 2014 fatwa calling on able-bodied men to fight the Islamic State group massively swelled the ranks of Shiite militias. In 2019, as anti-government demonstrations gripped the country, his sermon lead to the resignation of thenPrime Minister Adil AbdulMahdi.
Al-Sistani is also notoriously reclusive and has not left his Najaf home in years. He does not make public appearances and his sermons are delivered by representatives. He rarely receives foreign dignitaries.
The Vatican’s hope was that Francis would sign a document with al-Sistani pledging human fraternity, just as he did with Sunni Islam’s influential grand imam of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, based in Egypt.
The signature was among many elements the two sides negotiated over extensively. In the end, Shiite religious officials in Najaf told
the AP a signing was not on the agenda, and al-Sistani will issue a verbal statement instead.
Each minute of Saturday’s meeting will likely unfold as meticulously as a scripted stage play.
The 84-year-old pontiff ’s convoy will pull up along Najaf ’s busy column-lined Rasool Street, which culminates at the Imam Ali Shrine, one of the most revered sites in the world for Shiites.
To the side is an alleyway too narrow for cars. Here, Francis will walk about 30 yards to al-Sistani’s home, which the cleric has rented for decades.
Waiting to greet him at the entrance will be al-Sistani’s influential son, Mohammed Ridha.
Inside, and some steps to the right, the pontiff will come face to face with the ayatollah.
Each will make a simple gesture of mutual respect.
Francis will remove his shoes before entering al-Sistani’s room.
Al-Sistani, who normally remains seated for visitors, will stand to greet Francis at the door and walk him to an L-shaped blue sofa, inviting him to take a seat.
“This has not taken place by his Eminence with any guest before,” said a Najaf religious official.
He will stand despite his fragile health, said the religious officials. Since fracturing his thigh last year, the cleric has been firmly ensconced indoors. Francis suffers from sciatica.
The Pope will be offered tea.
“His Eminence will provide His Holiness a message of peace and love for all humanity,” said the official.
Gifts will be exchanged. It is not clear what Najaf will bestow, but Francis will almost certainly present al-Sistani with bound copies of his most important writings, top among them his latest encyclical “Brothers All,” about the need for greater fraternity among all peoples to bring about a more peaceful, ecologically sustainable and just world.
Until now, papal plans to visit Iraq have ended in failure.
The late Pope John Paul II was unable to go in 2000, when negotiations broke down with the government of then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
One setback after another nearly scuttled this one too.
Iraq fell to a second wave of the coronavirus last month spurred by the new, more infectious strain that first broke out in the U.K. At the same time, a spate of rocket attacks resumed targeting the American presence in the country. The U.S. has blamed Iran-aligned militias.
Those same groups, strengthened after al-Sistani’s fatwa, are accused of terrorizing Christians and preventing them from returning home.
When it comes to large-format fiscal management — the commonwealth of Virginia, for instance — sometimes you get it right. Or you get lucky. Or a mixture of the two.
It’s been all of the above over the past year for Gov. Ralph Northam and his budget managers, during a period of unprecedented pandemic-confounding economic uncertainty.
How well the state budget turned out — the headline is that it turned out better than almost anyone expected — requires a quick flashback to many anxious prognostications.
“This is going to be horrific for state and local finances,” Donald J. Boyd, the head of Boyd Research, an economics and fiscal consulting firm, told The New York Times last April.
The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projected cumulative state budget shortfalls of $650 billion over two years. COVID was coming. Everyone was going inside. Businesses — the hospitality industry, in particular — were rapidly pulling back.
States expected their revenue to plunge by 15-20%, according to an Associated Press report last May in the Daily Press. It was going to be very bad.
“In nearly every state that has estimates, the projected budget gaps are bigger than the emergency savings.”
Now we’re here in March 2021 and what-do-you-know. Virginia weathered the uncertainty, yielded to no program-compromising cutbacks (think public education) and kept the Virginia ship of state on a relatively even keel.
Last month, Northam even announced that state tax revenue would clock in at $730 million more than expected and budget conferees agreed to plop around $900 million into the state’s reserve funds.
All this is good and dangerous both, but let’s stick with the good news first.
The cliché ship metaphor works, by the way, because you can’t sail the darn thing without help. There are other people on board — the General Assembly — who just happen to have the final say on navigation.
For instance, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Del. Luke E. Torian, D-Prince William, has earned broad praise for being level, sensible, restrained.
Another Chris Jones, the long-admired, evenly balanced former chair from Suffolk? No. Torian is definitely a Democrat, but has worked effectively with his counterpart in the state Senate, Finance and Appropriations Committee chair Janet Howell, D-Fairfax.
Along with Northam, Torian and Howell constituted an effective, workable team. That has inspired measure of business confidence, replacing an earlier sense of anxiety.
Too many of these new Democrats in the mix are national Democrats, so went the thinking, and heaven help Virginia if they adopt Washington spending instincts.
It wasn’t worry without cause. The House appeared full of people directing state government with marginal background for that level of responsibility.
As it happened, COVID applied the spending brakes on and, ironically, it may do the Democrats some political good — particularly if the economy continues to rebound through 2021, as many expect it to do.
In the meantime, the new two-year
$135 billion state budget will deliver
5% pay raises for state employees and public school teachers, as well as university employees. State Police officers will receive an 8% hike, making compensation for these vital positions marginally more competitive.
All that is a plus.
Now the worry. What lessons do the Democrats take from the past tumultuous year? One should be the obvious capacity of life to deal the unexpected. Fattening the reserve fund and buttressing the state’s credit rating were the right instincts.
Second, as the year progresses and the fall legislative elections beckon, an inventory of the economic wreckage needs to occur.
The pandemic wasted Virginia’s restaurants and hotels and the state must not roll on to better times without a full accounting of how bad this had been.
In other words, as Northam further reviews the budget, wherever there can be adjustments to relieve pain — by one accounting, 72,000 hotel and restaurant jobs were lost — he should do so.