Cuba's Raul Castro emerges as a Pope Francis fan

The Cuban leader said Pope Francis' focus on the needs of the poor is luring him back to the church.

|
Gregorio Borgia/AP
Cuban president Raul Castro meets with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Sunday May 10.

Cuban President Raul Castro on Sunday thanked Pope Francis for brokering the thaw between Havana and Washington and said the pope so impressed him that he might return to the Church, despite being a communist.

The 83-year-old younger brother of Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel spoke with the pope for nearly an hour - unusually long for a papal meeting - during a visit the Vatican said was strictly private and not a state visit.

Papal audiences on Sundays are extremely rare. Francis made an exception when Castro asked if he could stop in Rome on his way back from Moscow to thank Francis for the Vatican's mediation between the United States and Cuba, Cuban officials said.

Leaving the meeting, Castro told reporters that he thanked the pope for Vatican mediation that led to December's historic resumption of diplomatic relations between the former foes after more than half a century of antagonism.

Later, at a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Castro said he came out of the meeting with the pope "really impressed by his wisdom and his modesty".

Francis, who is due to visit both Cuba and the United States in September, is a member of the Jesuit religious order. Castro joked that "even I am a Jesuit in a certain sense" because he was educated by the Jesuits before the revolution.

"When the pope comes to Cuba in September, I promise to go to all his Masses and I will be happy to do so," he said, adding that he reads all of the speeches of Latin America's first pope, who has made defence of the poor a major plank of his papacy.

"I told the prime minister if the pope continues to talk as he does, sooner or later I will start praying again and return to the Catholic Church, and I am not kidding," he said.

Both of the Castro brothers were baptised as Catholics.

The Church's activities were suppressed for decades after the 1959 revolution. The government began loosening restrictions in the early 1990s. After the late Pope John Paul visited in 1998 Fidel Castro re-instated Christmas as a holiday.

The pope's U.S. trip had been planned for some time before the Vatican announced last month that Francis would stop in Cuba on his way to Washington. Francis is expected to stay in Cuba at least two days, Vatican sources said.

It will be the Argentine pope's first visit to both countries as pontiff. His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, visited Cuba and met Fidel Castro.

This year, the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics is also due to make trips to Bosnia in June, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay in July, and several African countries towards the end of the year.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Cuba's Raul Castro emerges as a Pope Francis fan
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2015/0510/Cuba-s-Raul-Castro-emerges-as-a-Pope-Francis-fan
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe