The papabili — and Angelo Cardinal Scola among them

March 3rd, 2013 by Charles Cameron

For myself, I was particularly interested in his response to a question from Allen in a 2009 interview on Shi’ite messianism:

ALLEN: What are you hearing from your contacts in Iran these days? Looking down the line, it seems that Shi’a Muslims and Catholics share certain traits: A strong clerical hierarchy, a theology of sacrifice, and deep currents of popular devotion. Does this suggest that Catholicism can play an important role in a dialogue with Iran, where Shi’a Islam is dominant?

SCOLA: Three accents strike me in the Shi’a tradition: the necessity of a continual actualization of revelation in certain physical persons, to the point of overcoming a too-rigid conception of divine transcendence; the lively expectation of eschatological fulfillment; and the reflection on the problem of evil. I have the impression that we’re not well informed on these points, despite the enormous work of study and analysis that’s been done by specialists in recent years. We know Shi’ites better than we know Shi’ism!

The Oasis network really hasn’t arrived yet in Iran, so what I know about what’s happening is what I see and read in the mass media. I don’t doubt, however, that many people in Iran want better relations with the West. We must not forget that Persian culture has shown itself to be extraordinarily fertile and receptive.

The principal problem, if I can put it slightly audaciously, is that Shi’ite messianism, almost unable to bear the weight of the expectations with which it is structurally bound up, has been converted over the centuries, at least in some circles, into a political ideology. We’re talking about a long process that’s not linear, which experience a brusque acceleration with the 1979 revolution. As Westerners, we were caught off guard. We had forgotten that history is also sometimes forged by ‘theological options.’

In any event, all this is reversible.

A comparison of the Shi’ite Ta’zieh “passion plays” mourning the martyrdom of Husayn at Kerbala with the equivalent Catholic play at Oberammergau memorializing the passion of Christ confirms the resemblance Allen suggests between the “theology of sacrifice, and deep currents of popular devotion” in Shi’a Islam and Catholicism respectively.

As for our lack of awareness of the contemporary pull of Islamic eschatology, Scola’s words mirror one of my own concerns to a T:

As Westerners, we were caught off guard. We had forgotten that history is also sometimes forged by ‘theological options.’

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Posted in Apocalyptic, Benedict XVI, Charles Cameron, christianity, Islam, islamic world, Mahdist, Specs, Uncategorized | 1 comment

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  1. Charles Cameron:

    March 12th, 2013 at 4:49 am

    Interestingly enough, here’s an excerpt from a Laurie Goodstein & Elisabetta Povoledo piece in the March 10th NYT titled Before Smoke Rises at Vatican, It’s Romans vs. the Reformers — perhaps counter-intuitively suggesting Scola as the candidate of the “Reformers”:

    The main divide pits the cardinals who work in the Vatican, the Romans, against the reformers, the cardinals who want the next pope to tackle what they see as the Vatican’s corruption, inefficiency and reluctance to share power and information with bishops from around the world.

    But the factions in this conclave do not break along geographical lines, and in fact they have produced alliances that are surprisingly counterintuitive: the Romans’ top preference appears to be a Brazilian, and the reformers are said to be pushing for an Italian.
    .
    This conclave is far more unpredictable and suspenseful than the last because the church landscape has shifted in the last eight years. The next pontiff must unite an increasingly globalized church paralyzed by scandal and mismanagement under the spotlight in a fast-moving media age. And among the cardinals, there is no obvious single successor to Pope Benedict XVI, who rattled the church by resigning last month at age 85.
    .
    With all of the uproar over Vatican scandals, the Romans are aware that they may fail if they back one of their own, and so they are said to be coalescing behind the Brazilian, Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer, the archbishop of São Paulo.
    .
    Cardinal Scherer is of German heritage, but his selection would give the Roman Catholic Church its first pope from Latin America. The region is home to about 40 percent of the world’s Catholics, and the church is staving off challenges there both from surging evangelical churches and a drift toward secularism.
    .
    The reformers, led by the Americans and some influential Europeans, are reportedly uniting around the Italian, Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, a popular pastor and an erudite moral theologian. As an Italian, he is familiar with the culture that dominates the Vatican bureaucracy, but he is not a part of it or beholden to it.

    A compromise might give us Cardinal Ouellet:

    If neither the Romans nor the reformers have enough votes to elect their front-runners, there are compromise candidates.
    .
    One name mentioned even before Benedict’s resignation is that of a Canadian, Cardinal Marc Ouellet. He is a doctrinal conservative who taught philosophy in Colombia and may have support from some Latin American cardinals. But Cardinal Ouellet has spent many years working in the Vatican and has led the department for bishops since 2010. He could be seen as a crossover candidate acceptable to both Romans and reformers.

    We shall see…