VATICAN CITY — Cardinal Marc Ouellet ambled across St. Peter’s Square Saturday afternoon unnoticed by swarms of pilgrims, tourists and journalists.

Thirty hours later the 68-year-old Canadian, who is among the favourites to be named as the next pope, was greeted by hundreds of journalists when he celebrated mass Sunday evening in a packed church 200 metres from the Vatican.

If Ouellet is chosen to succeed Benedict XVI as the Vicar of Christ at a papal conclave that is to begin Tuesday one can only imagine how much life will change for the burly prelate from the backwoods of Quebec. At a minimum the avid hockey player and fan will never again enjoy a leisurely stroll in St. Peter’s Square or a quiet vacation with his 91-year-old mother  Graziella, or hunting and fishing with friends and relatives in his birthplace of La Motte, Que., a tiny village 500 kilometres northwest of Ottawa.

Parishioners who attended Ouellet’s mass at the Santa Maria in Traspontina Church in Rome on Sunday were unanimous that he had given a bravura performance. Speaking entirely in Italian at the local church assigned to him as cardinal-priest when he became one of the princes of the church is 2003, Ouellet said during his homily that God had already decided who the next pope would be and that the cardinals would simply be naming the one that He had already chosen.

“This is not only a big event for the Catholic Church but for the world, which is watching,” the former Archbishop of Quebec said in another reference to the conclave, or perhaps to the wall of television cameras lined up near the altar.

After the mass an elderly woman gushed that Ouellet’s charisma reminded her of John Paul II,  who chose him to be a cardinal in 2001. Another female parishioner described Ouellet’s homily as “fantastico.” A third described it as “a great event. The cardinal is so linguistically gifted.”

“We need someone who can spread the word of Christ. This cardinal is such a man,” said Mario Galgano, a Vatican administrator who has often heard Ouellet celebrate masses. “He not only speaks good Italian but his message is very clear. He is exactly the kind of man the church needs.”

Galgano noted that the Italian media’s highly opinionated Vaticanistas had written a lot last week about the advantages of an American pope because cardinals from the U.S. were thought to be such great communicators.

“The passport is of no importance,” he said. “When I go to the Vatican supermarket there are Africans and Chinese there, too. Being a Canadian should be no handicap.”

Another fan was journalist Margarita Rojas of Colombia, where Ouellet worked for many years as a professor assisting Spanish-speaking seminarians in their formation.

“You could say that Cardinal Ouellet is as much Colombia’s candidate as he is Canada’s,” Rojas said. “He is really close to the Colombian people and still has many friends there.”

While not as obviously gregarious as several of the American cardinals, who constantly sought out journalists before being banned from doing so last week, Ouellet definitely has a greater stage presence than most of his media-shy European brethren. However, trying to balance these two qualities can be a tricky game. It is believed the cardinals badly want a pope with more charisma than Benedict, who was regarded as a better writer and thinker than public performer.

But if a pontiff has too much charisma, his outsized personality could dilute or divert attention from the church’s message or prevent him from tackling the grave issues facing the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics

Still, with the media having anointed as many as dozen favourites to succeed Benedict, including strong candidates from Hungary, Italy and the developing world, and the cardinals being notoriously secretive, it is bootless to speculate too much about who might be ahead and who might be trailing.

Ouellet has the slightly squashed face of a pugilist and is famously tough. Such attributes might help root out deep corruption in the Vatican and firmly deal with priests guilty of abusing children.

At the same time the cardinal is regarded as a conservative traditionalist who would not rock the boat much theologically on matters such as abortion, contraception and the ordination of women priests to say nothing of same-sex marriages. Such views have soured some commentators and reform-minded Catholics. But such principles are precisely why some of the 115 cardinal electors may consider Ouellet to be a ‘papabile’ (contender).

“What the media and the cardinals think are two very different things and we should not confuse one with the other,” was how Mario Galgano, who works with laity at the Vatican, put it.

Source:  Post Media News

As the world runs out of resources and the ice retreats, Canada’s sprawling Arctic territory is attracting interest from a host of different countries.

Two mighty ocean-going vessels: one Chinese and the other registered in the Netherlands. Both symbolic players in the world’s coming struggle for food, water, right of shipping transit and access to deep ocean resources.  Each combines to form a single message for Canada as it faces renewed challenges to its Arctic sovereignty.

First the Dutch ship. As you read this, the giant fishing trawler FV Margiris is ready to drop its nets in the wild vastness of the Southern Ocean. There is nothing between the 9,499-ton factory ship and the Antarctic ice shelf but thousands of miles of open ocean – and an angry Australian government.  It is well aware of the mega-ship’s capacity. On Thursday the government enacted legislation keeping the FV Margiris out of its territorial waters for at least two years.

Here’s why. The 142-metre trawler, the second biggest of its type in the world, is capable of catching 250 tons of fish per day and has a cargo capacity of 6,200 tons. The catch is harvested via a towed 600-metre long net, processed onboard and then shipped direct to West Africa; an area that was once self sufficient in sea produce but now imports it as its own stocks have collapsed from over-fishing.  The sheer scale of the venture raised concerns about the sustainability of domestic smaller-scale operations along the Australian coastline in the face of such competition.

Now look north to Canada’s sphere of interest.  Here another mega-ship has quietly created a piece of history of its own.  The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long anchored in the Icelandic harbour of Skarfabakki at the end of August 2012, after covering the 15,000km distance from its Yellow Sea homeport of Qingdao in less than six weeks via the Arctic.  The Xue Long – or Snow Dragon – is hard to miss.  At 14,997 tons, the slab sided vessel is the largest conventionally powered icebreaker in the world.

This was its fifth trip north and the longest, combining business with scientific research and geo politics. It follows China’s recent application to become an observer at the Arctic Council, made up of the United States, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

Nearly 170m from stem to stern, the Ukraine-built vessel has a beam of 23m and can sail through 1.1m of ice at a steady speed of 1.5 knots. China has a second already on order. Like comparably sized Russian and South Korean ships before it, the journey of the Xue Long, traversing the East Siberian Sea and the Barents Sea, was made possible by melting ice. Its northern passage shows the possibility of cutting sea route travel times from the Pacific to Europe by up to 40% compared to a transit through the Panama Canal.

That’s not all. With less ice, new fishing grounds become more readily available and natural resources like gas, oil and even iron ore are open to innovative miners using ice-reinforced carriers to get their product to market.

According to Professor Rob Huebert, a fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI), this blend of receding Arctic ice and global competition for resources means Canada has a century of challenges ahead.  “There are many non-Arctic nations more visible in this part of the world now simply because they can navigate more freely and without hindrance,” Dr. Huebert said. “Countries like South Korea, Japan and China know the Northwest Passage could be open for large parts of the summer in as little as 15 years.  We know Chinese leaders alone have made no fewer than seven trips to Arctic nations since 2009. They have signed multiple agreements and sought to work more closely with Denmark and Greenland. They are looking to the future because they have to. Sheer population pressures drives that; the need to feed a growing numbers of mouths.”

Canada has traditionally claimed Arctic sovereignty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made no secret of his desire for Canada to be an active player in the region. It just needs the assets – military and non-military – to match the intent.

“Canada still has a limited ability to assert control in our northern waters due to a variety of factors,” Dr. Huebert said.  “More research ships are coming, more transiting commercial traffic, more international players looking for everything from fishing grounds to accessible ore reserves and minerals. I¹m not certain Canada is ready for that.”

What is certain is that the looming fight for the Arctic has all the hallmarks of the 19th century struggle between Britain and Tsarist Russia over expansionist policies in the buffer states of Central Asia, known simply as the Great Game.  This time it’s Canada versus everyone else and it’s our game to lose.

Source:  Toronto Sun