Pope, ayatollah to make history
Religious leaders’ meeting in Iraq decades in the making
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-the-scenes preparations that touched on everything from shoes to seating arrangements.
The geopolitical undertones weigh heavy on the meeting, along with twin threats from a viral 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, Pope Francis is implicitly 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 at the 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 said 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 swelled the ranks of Shiite militias. In 2019, as anti-government demonstrations gripped the country, his sermon lead to the resignation of then-Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.
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 said a signing was not on the agenda, and al-Sistani will issue a verbal statement instead.
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. Iraqi government and religious officials are concerned that these militias could carry out rocket attacks in Baghdad or elsewhere to show their displeasure over al-Sistani’s meeting with Francis.
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.