Pope Francis leads an audience with Italian athletes in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican December 19, 2014.GIAMPIERO SPOSITO/Reuters
Pope Francis finished 2014 with a bang. The man of God, it turns out, can also work his magic on decidedly Earthly matters. Last week, he brokered a détente between the United States and Cuba that, five decades after it started, should finally end the Cold War for Cuba. If Pope John Paul II was instrumental in tearing down the Iron Curtain, it was Pope Francis who finished the job.
Or so enthusiastic supporters of Pope Francis would like to believe. The reality is somewhat different. Give Francis and his secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, full credit for knocking a few American and Cuban heads together in the last year in secret meetings in Italy and Canada, but it was John Paul who did most of the heavy lifting on the Cuba file.
The success of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution in 1959 was decidedly bad news for the Vatican, which had established formal diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1935. Most Cubans were Christians and most of them were Catholic. The Church thrived in the pre-Castro era but any hope that Mr. Castro, who was educated by Jesuits, would leave the Catholics alone after he took Havana ended in 1961.
That's when the Communist government nationalized all religious properties (not just Catholic ones), cast the Roman Catholic bishop and his underlings from its shores, jailed some priests and declared Cuba an atheist country. What little remained of the church went underground, as it did in most of Eastern Europe during the Soviet era.
But the church never abandoned Cuba and, ever so discretely, kept unofficial talks open with Mr. Castro's people. In 1994, Pope John Paul elevated the Archbishop of Havana to the College of Cardinals, a gesture of support for the clapped-out church in Cuba.
Two years later, Mr. Castro visited Rome for a United Nations food conference and broke away to meet John Paul. Two years after that, at Mr. Castro's invitation, John Paul made a five-day visit to Cuba – he was the first pope to visit the island – and blessed a stone that would stand at the entrance of the first new seminary to be built since the Cuban revolution.
The Bill Clinton administration didn't fight the Pope's visit to Cuba. But if Mr. Castro thought that making Cuba safe for the Catholic Church would convince the U.S. Congress to lift the embargo, he was wrong; it stayed intact, even if Mr. Castro won some points for allowing religious freedom again.
John Paul died in 2005 and his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, worked the Cuba file hard too. In 2012, a year before his retirement, Benedict visited Cuba and, crucially, discussed the Alan Gross case with President Raul Castro, according to an Associated Press story published last week. Mr. Gross, a U.S. government subcontractor, claims he was merely setting up Internet access for Cuba's small Jewish community in 2009, when he was arrested, accused of working for American intelligence services and convicted of crimes against the Cuban state.
Enter Pope Francis, an Argentinian who has always had a soft spot for Cuba and wrote a book called Dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro shortly after John Paul's 1998 visit to Cuba. In it, he was highly critical of Cuban denial of individual religious freedom – their "transcendent dignity," he called it – and denounced the U.S. embargo. "The Cuban people must overcome this isolation," he wrote.
The book also emphasized the "value of dialogue" in diplomacy and that's exactly what the Pope and Cardinal Parolin, his well-regarded secretary of state, who restored the Vatican's ties with Vietnam, did. At the Pope's urgings, a series of meetings between Cuban and American diplomats were held. In January, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Francis to ask the Pope for help in securing Mr. Gross's release. In March, U.S. President Barack Obama visited the Pope and discussed Cuba.
The meetings between the U.S. and Cuban delegations picked up momentum in the autumn. Last Wednesday, the deal was done. The release of Mr. Gross was announced as was the release of three Cubans who had been imprisoned as spies in the United States. The United States would restore diplomatic ties with Cuba though the removal of the embargo itself will require congressional approval.
In his TV address, Mr. Obama thanked the Pope for helping to resolve the Gross case and for his "moral example" while Mr. Kerry said: "I look forward to being the first Secretary of State in 60 years to visit Cuba."
There is little doubt that Francis's mission would have been harder, perhaps impossible, if his two predecessors, especially John Paul, had not been enthusiastic and patient supporters of reconciliation between the United States and Cuba. The Vatican is often criticized for moving slowly, too slowly; that it examines issues for years, when weeks would do, or decades, when years would do. Its investment in Cuba took decades and it paid off spectacularly.