He was an archdeacon set up against Pope St. Boniface I by a clerical faction.
When Boniface was chosen pope by a majority of the Roman electors, his rival Eulalius, a deacon, was simultaneously chosen by a clerical faction.
In addition, Iran has a talented population and an economy that could soar, if its clerical, faction-ridden revolutionary government ever yielded to a modernizing one.
Until 861 the clerical faction tried to impose a government of fraternity on the descendants of Charlemagne, manifested in the numerous conferences they held, but the competition of the brothers and their supporters undermined clerical efforts.
The opposing factions within the clerical hierarchy, the "reformists" and "conservatives", have ranged themselves behind the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and speak, more or less, with a single voice.But that voice is saying, or implying, more than one thing at a time.
Though the Iranian intellectual establishment and even factions within the clerical ruling clique would prefer a lessening of international tensions, the chosen symbol of the real centers of power in Iran represents its most hard-line agenda.
The women of the title are Fereshteh and Roya, who meet as university students in Tehran and become fast friends in the tumultuous period of the Iranian revolution of the late 1970's, when factions dedicated to the clerical forces of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini clashed with westernized intellectuals and liberals on campuses.
Ayatollah Montazeri, who has been under house arrest in the holy Shiite Muslim city of Qom since 1997 for challenging the credentials of Iran's supreme clerical leader, stopped short of endorsing any of the candidates or factions.
Ahmad Janati, a powerful Iranian cleric and a close confident of Khamenei, warned last month that certain political factions in Iran were already planning for greater influence in the next assembly of experts, implying that clerical groups critical of the establishment were hoping to enter the body.
At the time, Iran was in the midst of profound political and social turmoil as a host of competing factions - from the Marxists to the Social Democrats to the clerical establishment - vied with one another for control over the new government.
