Pope Francis met with Fidel Castro over the weekend.
It’s not the first time the Bishop of Rome has met with a dictator, in Cuba or elsewhere. But it is the first time this particular pope has done so.
Next stop on this tour? The United States.
The pope’s most pointed words were directed not to the Communist nation but south by southwest, to Colombia, from where hail contestant parties to peace talks (the government versus leftist insurrectionists) now being held in Havana. The pope wishes no breakdown in the talks, urging that the world cannot afford “another failure on the path of peace and reconciliation.”
Pope Francis has been credited with the thawing of cold war relations between the United States and Cuba, and, for his part, praises both parties for the detente, which he has dubbed “an example of reconciliation for the whole world.”
But Cuba remains under tyranny; the people cannot speak freely and are impoverished under the thumb of socialistic regulation. The pope may not be seeing elements of causality here, of teleology, of purpose: Cuba’s poverty is not caused by the American embargo, really, but by a pernicious attachment to outdated ideas of government supremacy over people.
Unfortunately, many of the pope’s most famous remonstrances about capitalism suggest that he may be closer to the Castro brothers’ oppressive Marxist ideology than to a more liberatory approach.
While the pope publicly prays for reconciliation, Americans would be better off if we repudiated reconciliation with destructive ideas that too easily get packaged as “humane” and “Christian” when they are really, and deeply, precisely the opposite.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “No Reconciliation with Communism”
Hard to say which occupied country is more theoretically evil: the fascist US or the socialist Cuba. And why should any reasonable person attach any importance to what a goofy clown says or thinks? Talk about pure evil: The Church of Rome.
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/the-pope-appeareth/
I do not get this Pope. I don’t understand why anyone would be enamored by most of what he has to say. His “ether” is wasted on me.
I do feel as though he is exactly what you say, “destructive ideas that too easily get packaged as “humane” and “Christian” when they are really, and deeply, precisely the opposite.” I have very often said that the bonds of big government solving all ills, typically leading to the bondage of subsidies & overspending, is packaged as humanism or Christianity. It is neither. These notions of curing all the world’s problems by throwing money at it & controlling the people in some PC world, will be our downfall.
I don’t get him, either, but as someone brought up under hard-core Catholic teachings, before “falling away”, I can see why the “faithful” feel obliged to contort themselves to reconcile the irreconcilable, as respect for the Pope is demanded.
I also have the additional insight of having attended a Jesuit university, not for religious reasons, but because it was the best alternative to the Far-Left state university I attended briefly. It was still a better and more objective, rational education. However, I majored in Economics, and while most of the “lay” professors leaned toward the free-market with of course some Keynesians, the three economics professors I had who were Jesuit priests were openly and proudly Marxist. I believe that Francis is too, and like my old professors, simply are willfully blind to the real-world consequences of Socialism.