Writing in The Daily Beast, Barbie Latza Nadeau:
When John Paul II visited this strange and wonderful island 17 years ago, he kissed a tray of Cuban soil held up by children at his airport ceremony and held Fidel Castro at arm’s length telling him in no uncertain terms that he was there to pray that Cuba would become a land of “freedom, mutual trust, social justice and lasting peace.” It was a kind of victory lap for the great Cold War crusader against Communism, given credit by many for vanquishing Fidel’s sponsors in the by-then quite defunct Soviet Union.
The elder Castro was just as rigid, using his time at the podium to say Cuba was fine just the way it was, thank you. “We choose a thousand deaths rather than abdicate our convictions,” he told John Paul as a way of greeting. Nothing could be more different from the welcoming ceremony when Francis landed here on Saturday night, not least because Pope Francis shares many of the convictions that Fidel and Raul officially say they stand for: identifying with the poor, calling for greater income equality.
On Friday evening, Francis and Fidel’s younger brother, Cuban President Raul Castro, greeted each other like old friends, embracing in such a warm way one can almost imagine them sitting down over a glass of rum (and a cigar?) in the old city center like old compañeros de lucha, comrades in the struggle.
. . . Francis then asked Castro to greet his ailing brother and “convey my sentiments of particular respect and consideration” to Fidel. After delivering his Sunday angelus in Revolution Square, Francis spent about 40 minutes visiting with Fidel at the former leader’s private residence in Havana for what Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told reporters in Havana was an “intimate and familial” conversation with around 10 people in attendance.
“Intimate and familial”? I wonder what all those families shattered by the Castro regime think about that.
Meanwhile, The Economist chips in with a breathless article anticipating the visit of Francis, a pope for Davos liberals if there ever was one, to the U.S. Unfortunately, it lets gush get in the way of facts, claiming that the Pope’s “approval rating among Americans is in the high 80s”.
Not so much.
59 percent of Americans surveyed said they have a favorable view of the pope, but that is sharp decrease from last February, when 76 percent held a favorable view of the Argentinian, who was elected to succeed Benedict XVI in March 2013.
Pope Francis is viewed positively by most Americans, and especially among Catholics. Forty-one percent of Americans overall have a favorable opinion of Pope Francis, which jumps to 63 percent among American Catholics.
Now, I have no doubt at all that the Pope’s visit here will be a great success and that he will see a big jump in his ratings on the back of it, but the fact that The Economist felt the need to exaggerate in the way it did was, well, telling.
As you can see over on our home page, George Will is rather less enthusiastic about the Pope’s arrival on these shores, concluding:
He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.
Inevitably, and rightly, Will also refers back to the Pope’s dismal intellectual heritage:
Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism, the sterile redistributionism that has reduced his Argentina from the world’s 14th highest per-capita GDP in 1900 to 63rd today. Francis’s agenda for the planet — “global regulatory norms” — would globalize Argentina’s downward mobility.
That Argentine theological and political background is discussed at length, not unsympathetically and with considerable erudition by Claudio Ivan Remeseira here. I posted a few excerpts together with some commentary over at Secular Right yesterday.
Two extracts:
During the first decades of the 20th century, after the so-called Modernist crisis and the battles against secularism and its offspring — unfettered capitalism on the socio-economic side, liberal democracy and communism on the political one — , the Papacy devised a strategy to regain center stage in world affairs. In Argentina, this political-religious creed took the form of what Italian historian Loris Zanatta called “the myth of the Catholic nation”.
. . . In this theology, the People are defined in a narrow sense as the poor and the dispossessed.
And (my emphasis added)
For all the efforts made after Vatican II to find an accommodation with contemporary world, there is something at the core of this world that rejects those efforts, a radical incompatibility. In the last analysis, the issue continues to be secularization. The challenge for the Catholic Church is how to accommodate to today’s world without being assimilated into its secular values.
Francis’ mindset straddles this divide. One Anti-Modern trait of his thinking is his mistrust of Liberalism. Despite his constant appeals to political tolerance, Francis’ political thought is rooted in a pre-modern, organicist view of the community as foundation of social and political life. Liberal democracy and the modern doctrine of human rights are the antithesis of that view. In Evangelii gaudium, the word “people” appears 164 times; the word “democracy”, not once.
Another trait is his hostility toward capitalism. Far for being inspired in any left-wing or Marxist philosophy, Francis’ anti-capitalism comes down from the European right-wing writers of the early 20th century, who in turn found their source of inspiration in the Middle Ages. At the final stage of the Cold War, John Paul II made a timid move towards accepting the market as an autonomous social force. In the age of the anti-globalization movement, Francis would have none of it. His critique of capitalism seems to go even further than the objections traditionally made by Catholic Social Teaching since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. It is when indicting the world’s economic woes that Francis strikes his most prophetic tone (which, by the way, is another characteristic of Argentinian theology). The encyclical Laudato si, his great jeremiad against the evils of capitalism, has established Francis as one of the world’s foremost critics of Neoliberalism….
Doubtless, Speaker Boehner, who has so cleverly given the Pope the platform represented by an address to the Congress, will take the opportunity to discuss these matters when he and Francis, compañeros de lucha, relax together after the big speech.
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