A black Pope?

The buzz in Catholic circles is of the high likelihood that the next Pope may well be a black African -- specifically, one Cardinal Robert Sarah.  This article by the normally fine Catholic reporter, Sandro Magister, explains much of the significance; though for some reason, he doesn't mention the problem of Islam.  Robert Sarah (born in 1945) is a cardinal from the African nation of Guinea, a small country in West Africa just northwest of the area that is raging with an Islamic genocide of Christians, northern Nigeria.  Guinea too is a predominantly Muslim country (85% Islamic).

Will a Pope Robert be any better than a Pope Francis with regard to the problem of Islam?  I would fall off my cathedra in shock if he did prove to be as good as (or, God forbid, better than) Pope Benedict XVI.  But we needn't stew in our reasonable pessimism on the matter.  Consider what the good Cardinal himself has had to say about it, from an interview he gave about a year ago, largely about his new book, God or Nothing (Dieu ou rien), but also ranging onto other subjects, including Islam in Africa:

On relations between Christianity and Islam in Africa:

"Until recent times, Christians and Muslims lived in perfect harmony."

Oh, brother.  We don't really need to read any further to verify that Cardinal Sarah is a Dhimmi. (I say "Dhimmi" rather than PC MC or Leftist because of his provenance, growing up in a Muslim country as a Christian -- for, whenever we see Islamophiliac reflexes in such a milieu, it's more likely to stem from a holdover of dhimmitude rather than from Leftism or PC MC, as is the case in the West, where one has never lived under Islamic rule or had to breathe the cultural atmosphere of a Muslim-majority society.)

But I will go further, just to drive the nails into the coffin (or the theses into the door):

"The fanaticism, with the rivers of blood which it gives rise to and the barbaric violence it deploys, has come about [only] recently, since the 1970s, after certain Africans had been indoctrinated in Islamic universities in Saudi Arabia or in Libya, or elsewhere."

That's just a reiteration of the previous sentence, with a bit of specious specificity thrown in, having the effect of reinforcing the meme that (Islamic) "extremism" is a modern 20th century phenomenon, not a perennial constant of Islamic texts, history, and culture.

"The religious conflicts and massacres have rarely seen the light of day in Africa."

This is an obscenely inaccurate claim, given the horrendous violence perpetrated by Muslims in his neighboring Nigeria -- not to mention in Somalia and Sudan over the decades, let alone the grotesquely ultra-violent Islamic attacks in Kenya.

And finally:

"What we see happening in our time in the name of Islam is pure barbarism perpetrated by barbarians without God, without Faith or Law."

Another claim that is strangely disconnected from the massive mountain of data we have about Islam.  It becomes doubly strange from someone who is learned, intelligent, deeply interested in religion, and has lived in a Muslim-majority country.  Given that we know Cardinal Robert's claim is patently false -- that in fact Muslim terrorists are centrally motivated by their God, their Faith (the Islamic Deen) and their Law (Shariah) -- we marvel once again, even in our bitterly jaded weariness having seen it countless times before, at this degree & depth of Denial tantamount to a psychosis.

Postscript:

His aforementioned book, God or Nothing, seems to be largely a D'Souzish meditation on the godlessness of modern (Western) secular culture as, it would be implied, the single most important problem in our era, to be solved, or healed, by a return to God (meanwhile sidestepping exploding and stabbing Muslims who keep popping up around us and in our midst as the "new normal" that, of course, does not augur a systemic and metastasizing danger with a trajectory in our not-so-distant future ending in the destruction of our civilization...).

Thus, a Pope Robert would not only be the first black Pope, but also may well be the last (or, given that he would be in his 70s upon ascension to the Papal seat, and assuming that it will take Muslims more than 30 years to destroy us, penultimate) Pope before the Fall of the West to Islam.