South African Nobel laureate and human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on Monday for the Vatican to name Nigeria’s Cardinal Francis Arinze as pope to facilitate a better understanding of the poor in developing countries.
Writing in the newspaper USA Today as Roman Catholic cardinals began deliberating in Rome on their next pope, Tutu said the church needs to recognise and reward the large growth of Catholics in Africa and the Third World.
He specifically endorsed Arinze, who is black and widely considered one of several front-runners for the papacy.
”A black pope could do more than break a colour barrier — he could facilitate a greater global understanding of a neglected part of our world: the so-called Third World,” wrote Tutu.
”He would be their champion, the voice of these voiceless ones, and would prick the consciences of those who rule the roost in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation to evoke a more compassionate, more gentle, more caring world order into being,” said Tutu.
Tutu, an archbishop in the Episcopal Church and first black secretary general of the South African Council of Churches, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his role in leading South Africa out of the brutal era of apartheid.
He acknowledged that the notion of a black pope is controversial.
”Most Christians have grown up with the historically inaccurate image of Jesus as Caucasian when, as a Semitic, he would have been a great deal more swarthy than our conventional pictures of him as white,” he said.
While Tutu endorsed Arinze, he said the Vatican should at least choose its next pope from outside relatively developed Europe, the traditional source of popes.
”We need a pope from the Third World, where Roman Catholics, like many other major denominations, are growing spectacularly,” he said, adding that ”this is conspicuously not the case in any of the countries of the northern hemisphere”.
Tutu also said the next pope should reconsider the church’s objections to women priests, married clergy and contraception.
”We in the Episcopal Church have been richly blessed by our sisters’ outstanding service as bishops, priests and deacons,” he wrote. — Sapa-AFP