You didn’t know the pope has already left Cuba? You haven’t read about John Paul II meeting with Fidel Castro, much less speaking in Havana before hundreds of thousands of people in the Plaza of the Revolution?
You thought the only thing happening in the world was Bill Clinton amid still another of his paramour problems and moral morasses? Well, you can hardly be to blame, since there has been virtually nothing else in the papers for the past week.
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In fact, not only did the pope go to Cuba last week, but he also initiated one of the most extraordinary events in modern history. The pope began the re-Westernizing and re-Christianizing of communist Cuba.
Let me say, first, that I worried about three things: 1) the pope’s fragile health, 2) Fidel Castro’s shrewd cunning and 3) the fact that the Cuban people had been cut off from the Western, the Christian and the developed world for nearly 40 full years.
I worried needlessly. Here’s what I think you didn’t read in the papers this last harried week:
The pontiff held up extraordinarily well, thus confirming the judgments of his associates that he gains tremendous emotional and spiritual succor from the crowds that surround him at historic times like this. Cuban President Fidel Castro was exceedingly polite to the pontiff, despite his “welcoming” speech in which he, a Jesuit-trained student, blamed Catholicism for all the multiple woes of the Southern Hemisphere.
But that, while surely important, was far from the most important part of the trip.
Think about what the pope said. He could easily have spoken only in liturgical terms of this officially atheist state (Castro advanced Cuba to “secular” only in 1992), but he spoke in far more general moral terms.
In Santiago de Cuba, the fount of the revolution, he urged the Roman Catholic Church to take “courageous and prophetic stands in the face of the corruption of political or economic power.” He spoke of the rights of all religions to worship freely when he said in the plaza in Havana, “When the Catholic Church demands religious freedom, she is not asking for a gift, a privilege or a permission dependent on contingent situations, political strategies or the will of the authorities” but “the effective recognition of an inalienable human right.”
Over and over, he spoke of not the old obedience to Catholic doctrine alone, but to essentially the universal rights of individual conscience, participation in civil society and the duty to have dialogue with one’s fellow human beings. He made a no-holds-barred cry for freedom for political dissidents.
As for the Cuban people themselves, they responded quite remarkably, considering that they have had virtually no religious training for 39 years. Their responses were, while not overtly catechistic, naturally spiritual. They spoke of feeling peaceful, of vague human yearnings, and of God among them again. (Read: the natural human need for faith.)
What it will be possible to do in real life, in terms of genuinely inculcating a different value system day after day, will not be seen for some months. That becomes a question of more priests and ministers, of a transformation of the until-now-closed education system, and of the willingness of the state to bend to accommodate another faith.
But it would seem impossible for the Cuban state to close down totally again.
Many strands of history came together those brief five days in Cuba. There were many signs of the nation’s finally coming to terms with the Enlightenment (the pope asking for religious freedom for all religions). There were reflections of the pope’s prior organizing and inspiring inside Catholic Poland, his sure tactic of infiltrating totalitarianism from within through a counter morality and with a purifying principle.
Last week was special and singular. After it ended, there was no longer only one “Our Man in Havana.”