How Fidels faith remained a mystery to the end
The Jesuit-educated Fidel Castro rejected the Church of his childhood following the 1959 Cuban revolution, and for two decades never met a bishop. But then came a book-long interview with a Brazilian friar, and growing closeness between Church and state in Cuba -- as well as tantalizing signs that Castro was seeking reconciliation with his Catholic faith.
In this Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015 photo, Pope Francis meets Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba. (Credit: AP Photo/Alex Castro.)
Austen Ivereigh
November 26, 2016
When the Brazilian friar Frei Betto met Fidel Castro in 1980 in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, the two had a dense conversation about religious freedom in Cuba that led to a bestselling book that helped paved the way for a church-state rapprochement, and eventually, the visit by Pope John Paul II.
That book laid bare Fidel’s complex relationship with the Catholic faith of his childhood in 1940s Cuba, where as a child he was educated by Spanish Jesuit priests at an elite private school in the island’s southern city, Santiago.
Betto, a liberationist Dominican sympathetic to the Cuban revolution, told Castro in Managua that his communist state had, in effect, three options. It could be hostile to the Catholic Church - in which case it simply made the case for the U.S. embargo - indifferent to it, or in dialogue with it along with other churches and faiths.
Castro accepted that the third option was the right one, and admitted that he hadn’t met a Catholic bishop in 16 years. While the revolutionary government had never broken with the Holy See, it was, in effect, a confessional state - officially atheist.
https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2016/11/26/fidels-faith-remained-mystery-end/
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/rebel-priests.htm
