Thursday, October 25, 2012

Video hits Africa's papal push

Peter TurksonTHE screening of an inflammatory video about Muslims during a high-level meeting at the Vatican this past week has drawn unwelcome attention to an African cardinal who is about to take over as the bookmakers' favourite to be the next pope. 
 
Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana upset some other Catholic Church officials by showing the seven-minute video Muslim Demographics, which uses false or unverifiable statistics to claim that Islam is swamping Christianity in Europe.

The video claims, for instance, that 25 per cent of Belgians are Muslims, a figure that is four times higher than the true rate, and asserts rather dubiously that the average Muslim family in France has 8.1 children.

Cardinal Turkson is the second-favourite on the most-watched collection of odds about who will be the next pope, run by Irish bookmaker Paddy Power.

The 64-year-old is given odds of 9-4 behind fellow African cardinal Francis Arinze (15-8) , who will turn 80 on November 1 and lose his place among the 120-or-fewer "elector cardinals" who select popes.
 
Cardinal Turkson screened the video at a synod of 262 bishops, prompting Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi to insist the following day that the video "does not express the view of the synod or the Vatican".

Vatican Radio was harsher, saying it was "quite unclear" why a cardinal would choose to show "this piece of anti-Islamic propaganda" at a time when the Catholic Church was trying to improve relations with Muslims.

Cardinal Turkson's rise within the church followed the success of Cardinal Arinze, who reached No 4 in the Vatican hierarchy before gaining worldwide attention as a strong contender to be the first black pope in 1500 years when he emerged as "papabile" or "popeable" before the death of John Paul II in 2005.

The Nigerian has already retired from his full-time job in the Vatican but passing the milestone of 80 will end any remaining speculation that he could replace the German-born Pope Benedict, who is 85.

Pope Benedict has become less mobile over the past two years and questions were raised about the acuity of his once razor-sharp mind during the criminal trial this month of his former butler Paolo Gabriele on charges of stealing confidential documents.

Gabriele told the court that he leaked the documents to a reporter because he feared the Pope had become vulnerable to manipulation by Vatican power-brokers. The butler claimed that while he was serving the Pope lunch the pontiff asked him questions that made it clear the church's leader did not know about some of the most important developments in the Vatican.

Most Vatican-watchers did not consider Cardinal Ratzinger a strong contender for the papacy before the death of John Paul but the punters got it right, slashing the German's Paddy Power odds so much that he overtook Cardinal Arinze to become 3-1 favourite by the time of his appointment.

John Allen, a long-time Vatican analyst for the US National Catholic Reporter newspaper, says diplomats, clergymen and journalists who specialise in church affairs believe Cardinal Turkson is only a long-shot for the papacy. 

Allen believes that "if the next pope were to be an African" he would probably be either Cardinal Turkson or Cardinal Robert Sarah, 66, of Guinea.

Each of those men has run a major diocese in Africa and now runs a department at the Vatican although "Sarah would be seen as the heavier-hitter inside the Vatican", according to Allen.

"Turkson has a higher public profile, he's an extremely likeable man, and he usually comes off as a pragmatist, able to engage a wide cross-section of views."

Having two candidates from Africa would split any support for a black pope, and Allen says the near-consensus among Vatican watchers is that there are two front-runners: Angelo Scola, the intellectual 70-year-old Archbishop of Milan and Marc Ouellet, a 67-year-old from Quebec who worked as a priest in Colombia and would be seen as "the first pope from the New World".

A third contender is Leonardo Sandri of Argentina. Apart from being a former Vatican chief of staff who has the "insider" skills to assert better control over the Holy See bureaucracy, Cardinal Sandri has the politically happy mix of being of Italian descent when many in Rome believe it is time to restore Italian management, while also being Latin American.

Africa's claim on the top job is based on the simple argument that the church's leadership should be closer to its future followers.

By 2050, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Nigeria will together have more Catholics (200 million) than the three developed countries with the most Catholics, the US, Italy and France (197 million) but those African nations have just two "elector cardinals" compared with 44 from the three Western countries.

And yet Latin America easily trumps Africa as the church's heartland and its future. About half of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics live in the Americas, compared with a quarter in Europe and an eighth each in Africa and Asia. 

Australia's slice of less than 0.5 per cent of all Catholics means a local pope is out of the question but Cardinal George Pell, 71, is likely to be one of the most senior figures in the room when the choice is made between Cardinal Turkson and the other contenders.

Only 34 members of the voting college have been cardinals for longer than the Australian's nine years, and if the Pope reaches his 90th birthday just nine of the 120 voting cardinals will be more experienced than Cardinal Pell.