How Pope Francis helped make history with Cuba

From The Boston Globe:

The restoration of full diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, as well as a prisoner exchange that secured the release of American Alan Gross, was brokered, in part, by the Holy See.

A high-ranking Vatican official confirmed Wednesday that the Obama administration and the Vatican have been working together for more than a year to end decades of hostility and restore relations between the United States and the Caribbean nation.

After 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, the pontiff hosted at the Vatican the final meeting between US and Cuban officials in October, according to the Vatican. The final agreement was reached during a telephone call between Presidents Obama and Raul Castro Tuesday.

Pope Francis sent private letters to both Obama and Castro last year, the Vatican confirmed, and US officials told USA Today that Obama and the pope discussed Cuba during the president’s visit to the Vatican in March.

The pope’s involvement in the diplomacy that led to the release of Gross and a wider rapprochement between the United States and Cuba had its roots in Boston, according to the cofounder of a Cambridge-based conflict resolution group that asked Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley to talk about Cuba with the pope.

Timothy Phillips — whose group Beyond Conflict has participated in conflict resolution initiatives in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and several countries in Latin America — said his group decided to approach O’Malley about a year ago, to see whether O’Malley would be willing to ask the pope to become directly involved in efforts to normalize relations with Cuba.

Phillips said he approached Jack Connors, a Boston businessman and O’Malley confidante, who put a meeting together between archdiocese officials and Beyond Conflict last March.

“The idea was to get the pope to bring this up with President Obama when he visited the Vatican,” Phillips said. “Cardinal O’Malley was very receptive, and in the end, so was the pope.”

In his announcement of the new diplomatic relations Wednesday, President Obama thanked Pope Francis, “whose moral example shows us the importance of pursuing the world as it should be, rather than simply settling for the world as it is.”

Read the rest at the Globe link. 

And Jaweed Kaleem at Huffington Post reaches back even further, to show how the roots for this deal stretch into the papacy of John Paul II: 

Cuba and the Vatican have officially had diplomatic ties for 79 years, an anniversary both nations celebrated with a photography exhibit in Rome earlier this year. But friendly ties advanced rapidly beginning in the early 1990s, when then-President Fidel Castro relaxed rules on religion by changing the country from being officially atheist to secular, and loosened restrictions on churches after a 1996 Vatican visit with John Paul II. In 1998, the then-pope made a five-day pilgrimage to Cuba, blessing a stone that would stand at the entrance to the first new seminary to be built since the Cuban revolution. The seminary opened in 2010, five years after John Paul II’s death.

“I think John Paul II is very happy right now,” said Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, a prominent American church leader who pastors to the largest Cuban-American community and last visited Cuba in 2012 for Pope Benedict XVI’s pilgrimage to the island. “When (John Paul II) went to Cuba, it made it okay for Catholics to go to church and be Catholic.” Not long after the pope’s visit, for example, Fidel Castro restored Christmas as a national holiday.

Wenski said the role of the Catholic Church, by far Cuba’s largest and most influential religious institution, has quickly grown in the intervening years, especially since Raul Castro came to power in 2008. Of the country’s 11 million residents, about 59 percent are Christian and most of those are Catholic, yet the country’s aging, dilapidated pre-revolution churches suffer from a shortage of priests, nuns and seminarians. Many Cubans practice their faith at home or through devotion to Our Lady of Charity, the island’s patron saint. Practices such as Santeria, which incorporate Catholic and West African spiritual practices, are popular alongside formal Catholic worship.