Time‘s Jeff Israely reports that the Vatican may soon act as a key mediator in negotiations between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s nuclear program.

Consider the irony of Pope Benedict-supposedly notorious in the Islamic world since his September 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany-acting as peacemaker between a Muslim power and the West.

While the Time piece focuses on the all-important geopolitical implications of such a relationship, Jeff incidentally raises a fascinating point about similarities between the faiths practiced in Vatican City and Iran:

Religious experts say that Catholicism and Shi’a Islam have a surprisingly similar structure and approach to their different faiths. “What you have in Iran is a strong academic tradition, with both philosophical and mystical aspects – in many ways like Catholicism,” says Father Daniel Madigan, a Jesuit scholar of Islam, and a member of the Vatican’s commission for religious relations with Islam who helped arrange for Khatami’s visit. There is also a clerical hierarchy in Shi’ism that is absent in other forms of Islam.

No doubt by coincidence, Reuters reports that the Vatican will soon issue a response to October’s open letter signed by 138 Muslim scholars and clerics seeking better relations with the Christian world.