Drinking buddies

If you ask some people who they would most like to meet, they would say Gandhi, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

For my money, it would be Cardinal Jaime Sin and Gus Dur. Here's why:

'Archbishop Sin—by 1976, cardinal—was too irrepressible to keep quiet for long. First came a pastoral letter denouncing a raid on a seminary by Marcos's troops, looking for communists. Then came advice to Imelda to curb her lifestyle. (The cardinal openly portrayed her as “the mining industry”, pointing to anything she fancied and shouting “That's mine!”) On one stony, bumpy ride with the couple in their limousine, he told them he was “being crucified between two thieves”.'

The Economist on Cardinal Jaime Sin


'“Sukarno was mad about sex, Suharto was mad about money, Habibie was mad about technology, but me? I’m just mad!” About his removal from the presidency in 2001, when he was almost blind: “I need help to step up, let alone step down.” About losing power: “It’s nothing. I regret more that I lost 27 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

Visiting Tokyo, he was delighted when the prime minister congratulated him on his “erection”. For a Muslim ulama, or priest-scholar, his appetite for smut was remarkable. He had naughty jokes on his website, and was once reported to the police by conservative clerics for emphasising the raunchier bits of the Koran.'

The Economist on Gus Dur