Pope Francis meets Iraq’s top ayatollah

UR, IRAQ >> First Pope Francis showed up at the modest residence of Iraq’s most reclusive, and powerful, Shiite religious cleric for a delicate and painstakingly negotiated summit. Hours later, he presided over a stage crowded with religious leaders on the windswept Plain of Ur, a vast and, now arid, expanse where the faithful believe God revealed himself to the Prophet Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.

In settings both intimate and theatrical, in gestures both concrete and symbolic, Pope Francis on Saturday sought to protect his persecuted flock by forging closer bonds between the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim world, a mission that is a central theme of his papacy and of his historic trip to Iraq.

By meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-husseini al-sistani in the holy city of Najaf, Francis threaded a political needle, seeking an alliance with an extraordinarily influential Shiite cleric who, unlike his Iranian counterparts, believes that religion should not govern the state.

In Ur, his speech, within view of a 4,000-year-old mud brick ziggurat with a temple dedicated to a moon god, added biblical and emotional resonance to the day.

The meetings, the church’s top officials said, were two parts of the same piece.

“Of course they go together,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, and second highest-ranking official after the pope, said in a brief interview.

“There is a direct link with what is happening here,” he said, gesturing at the stage in Ur, “and the meeting with al-sistani.”

Parolin spoke as he finished a tour of the structure of what the faithful believe was Abraham’s home. Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had it reconstructed with new brick walls and arches.

Francis rode in from an airport in the provincial capital, Nasiriya, a center of ongoing anti-government protests, past miles of blast walls, Iraqi and Vatican flags hung from barbed wire fences, and pickups loaded with soldiers and mounted machine guns. He arrived to the stage surrounded by Astroturf and red carpets, a hastily assembled bright spot in the desert plain.

“This blessed place brings us back to our origins,” Francis said, adding. “We seem to have returned home.”

The pope is visiting Iraq despite worries that the trip and any large gatherings might cause a superspreader event in a country suffering a spike in coronavirus cases. Francis did wear a mask in some places, but not others, and people who had gathered to see him — sometimes crowded shoulder to shoulder — did not always wear them.

In Ur, elders surrounding the pope spoke of the hardships that Iraq’s disappearing religious minorities have endured.