Posted on 09/26/2015 10:13:26 AM PDT by Dqban22
United States and Cuba, the Devil and Holy Water They are the two destinations of the next journey of Pope Francis, at the opposite poles of his geopolitical vision. The enigma of the pope’s silence on the absence of freedom in the regime of Fidel and Raúl Castro
by Sandro Magister
ROME, September 11, 2015 - The United States and Cuba, or the devil and holy water. The journey that Pope Francis has scheduled from September 19 to 27 will take him to the two opposite poles of his geopolitical vision: to the temple of the “economy that kills” and just beforehand to the outpost of the peoples on the path of redemption.
In the island of the Caribbean and in the “Alianza Bolivariana” already established between Cuba and the populist regimes of Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio in fact sees a preview of the “Great Homeland” that he longs for so much, the springtime of an integration of the Latin American continent in a Catholic and anti-capitalist vein.
He has already visited two of these countries, Ecuador and Bolivia, and will soon arrive in the third, Cuba. And he has always treated their rulers with great regard and even with cordiality, including when they have presented the greatest trials.
Against the totalitarian trend in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro he has never expended a single word, nor has he ever responded to the appeals of a population reduced to hunger. He has promoted the unworthy Bolivian president Evo Morales to de facto leader of those antagonistic “popular movements” that are for him, the pope, the future of the redeemed humanity. As for Cuba, here too what is startling about Francis is his silence.
Of course, once he has landed in Havana Francis will speak. But in skimming the program of the visit, it is striking how scanty it is. In other countries the pope has never failed to enter a prison or to meet with refugees and the homeless. In the United States it is already known where and when he will do this. But not in Cuba.
In Lampedusa he threw flowers into the ocean and cried out, “Shame!” but it is unlikely that he will do so from the Malecón in Havana, in front of the ocean strait that has swallowed up thousands of Cubans fleeing toward the coasts of Florida.
In a prison it would be difficult for him to encounter any of the hundreds of political detainees.
The Damas de Blanco, wives and mothers of dissidents in prison, who go to Mass every Sunday dressed in white and brave the insults and violence of the police, would have a hard time finding a place in the front row of the pope’s Masses.
As for the dissidents living in surveilled and intermittent freedom, many of them Catholic, the only hope is that the pope may be able to meet with one of them away from the spotlight and outside of the official program, as the regime benignly allowed American secretary of state John Kerry to do on the day of the inauguration of the restored United States embassy in Cuba.
There is a great deal of Realpolitik in the silence maintained by Pope Francis so far on the lack of freedom for the Cuban people. Vatican secretary of state Pietro Parolin and his substitute Angelo Becciu were raised in the school of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, a great diplomat at the time of the Soviet empire, and were nuncios in Venezuela and Cuba respectively. They know the country profiles, and Francis seems to adhere diligently to their instructions.
What the pope adds of his own is his personal, confidential approach, almost as a confessor, with the despots he encounters. He has succeeded in touching the notoriously stony heart of Raül Castro, leading him to express, after a private conversation at the Vatican, intentions of returning to the practice of the Catholic religion. Fidel can be counted on for an encore. The wager is that during his three days on the island Francis may come up with something else unplanned, capable of giving a minimum of substance to the cry “Libertad” already raised in vain by the Cuban crowds during the visits of the two previous popes.
In the United States it will be a completely different tune. Bergoglio has never been in love with what amounts to the greatest power of the West and of the world. And in his personal relationships too he makes no mystery of preferring a Vladimir Putin to a Barack Obama.
But the pope displays the same coolness toward the country’s body of bishops, many of them unrepentant Wojtylians and Ratzingerians. Because the bishops are also critical of the Obama administration, but for reasons different from those of Francis.
For the bishops what is under attack are the identity and freedom of man as issued male and female from the hands of God, while for the pope the supreme threat is the overweening power of the free-market economy.
In the scheduled speeches to Congress, at the UN, and to the bishops, it will be seen to what extent Francis will push his reprimand.
This guy who now lives in the country of Rome, came from a country where the Nazis fled to, and also embraced the Peron junta, with ‘da choich’s o.k.’.
He is an avowed marxist. What else would you expect?
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