A Birthday Present for the Pope

By: Drew Christiansen

December 18, 2014

“Realities are greater than ideas,” Pope Francis wrote in “The Joy the Gospel,” is a rule for peacemakers. For Francis, of course, “the realities” that matter most to the new Pope are human beings and their suffering. Ideas are necessary; they help illuminate reality. But they can also become detached from realities, resulting in “a lifeless and unfruitful self-centeredness.” 

Those last words describe the tired US policy banning US relations with Cuba. It has failed to bring a change in Cuba’s government. The biggest losers have been the Cuban people, who have suffered in unnecessary and enforced poverty for more than fifty years.  

To be sure, that poverty resulted from misguided, Communist-era economic policies; but also from the US embargo. The United States is Cuba’s most important neighbor and potentially its major trading partner. Congress must formally lift the embargo, but President Obama and President Raul Castro have set the course toward becoming good neighbors once again.  

While President Obama’s announcement of normalization came as a surprise, it is less surprising to learn of the special role that Pope Francis played in inviting the United States and Cuba to engage in a new dialogue and that the Vatican has given its pledge as the guarantor of rapprochement.  

The Pope, a critic of “airplane bishops,” was not known before becoming bishop of Rome for his attention to international affairs. But early on he set a pattern for making novel initiatives for the cause of peace. He spoke out against the potential US bombing of Syria in the crisis over chemical weapons, which led President Obama to adopt instead the alternative Russian proposal for disarming Syria of its nuclear weapons.  

In the Holy Land, he signaled his sympathy for Palestinian suffering with his stop to pray on the Palestinian side of the Israeli security wall. And later, he invited the Israeli and Palestinian presidents to join him at the Vatican to pray with him for peace at the Vatican. Now, he has parlayed a personal appeal from the family of Alan Grossman for the captive’s release into an opportunity for normalization of Cuban-American relations.

All these initiatives are in keeping with Francis’ belief that the Holy Spirit is constantly opening new opportunities in history, especially opportunities to break out of rigid, stultifying states of affairs, like the 50 year-long embargo. It also embodies his confidence in dialogue as a road to peace, and his critique of ideology as a refusal of encounter with the other. He holds out hope that in encounter between peoples new possibilities (or “syntheses”) can found. American Jews hailed Mr. Grossman’s release as “a Hannukah miracle.”  Mr. Obama’s announcement coming on Pope Francis’ seventy-eighth birthday may equally be called a birthday present to the Pope, whose restless energy and religious imagination keeps finding new opportunities for peace where others would cling to their hostility.    
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