When Pope Benedict XVI met Fidel Castro | National Catholic Register

COMMENT: If the Cuban dictator had read the first 21 pages of Introduction to Christianity, he might have discovered Pope Benedict XVI as his brother and a meaningful dialogue might have begun.

One cannot imagine two more diverse characters meeting and interacting cordially than Pope Benedict XVI and Fidel Castro: the former is a pious and highly educated leader of the Catholic Church; the latter was a Marxist-Lenin socialist whose government oversaw human rights abuses. Nevertheless, no matter how different, people are people and have that as a common denominator.

The meeting took place in March 2012 in Havana. Pope Benedict XVI gives a brief account of their meeting in his book Benedict XVI: Last Testament. The Pope was in his last full year as leader of the Catholic Church, while Castro was 85 years old and ill. The Pope’s impression of Castro was that he had “not yet emerged from the thought structures that made him powerful.” The word “yet” contained a glimmer of hope, however, because Cuba’s old leader had seen through “the convulsions of world history” and was happy that “the religious question is being raised again.”

The Cuban dictator asked Benedict XVI to send him some literature. Was Castro merely diplomatic or was he genuinely interested in Christianity?

We’ll never know, of course, but his request remains intriguing. Be that as it may, Benedict XVI sent him a copy of his 1970 book Introduction to Christianity, a very suitable work for the occasion. The Holy Father did not view Castro as the type of person likely to undergo a “great conversion” but believed that because he was acutely aware that so much had gone wrong, he was willing to look at things in a different way .

Pope Benedict XVI was not naive. He understood how extremely difficult it is for a Christian and a hardened atheist to enter into a productive dialogue. He begins Introduction to Christianity by quoting another thinker who shared this view, Søren Kierkegaard. The leading Danish existentialist liked to use parables to convey his philosophy.

One of his parables shows a clown already dressed and made up for his performance. A fire broke out in the circus and the manager sent the clown to go to the village to get help, as there was a real danger that the fire would spread quickly and engulf the village itself. However, the villagers mistook the clown for an advertising agent for the circus. The more the clown begged the villagers, the louder they laughed. Given his clown costume, he had no credibility. They thought he was playing his role very well, until it was too late for help and the village was burned down.

“I think this is exactly how the world will end,” said Kierkegaard, “to the general applause of sensible people who believe it is a joke.”

For both Pope Benedict XVI and Kierkegaard, Christianity is no joke. But how can communication take place? How can she protect herself against gross misinterpretations?

In the clown parable, the clown cannot communicate with the villagers. The result is a disaster. The villagers do not recognize their commonality with the clown. A Jewish parable makes the same point.

Martin Buber tells the story of an unbeliever who visited a very learned rabbi. His intention was to convince the rabbi, through argument, of the reasonableness of atheism. When he arrived at the rabbi’s house, he found his potential opponent walking up and down with a book in his hand, lost in thought.

Suddenly he stopped, looked at his new arrival and said, “But maybe it’s true after all.” The doubter resisted the rabbi with all his might, but the “maybe” echoed back at him and broke his resistance. There is a ‘maybe’ in all of us.

Benedict

Neither can completely escape doubt or faith. The believer has his doubts and the doubter cannot rid himself of the temptation to believe. If Castro had read the first 21 pages of Introduction to Christianity, he might have discovered Pope Benedict XVI as his brother and a meaningful dialogue might have begun.

Benedict was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger when he wrote the book. As he repeats: “Just as the believer knows that he is constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a constant temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world.”

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux grew up in a thoroughly religious atmosphere. Yet this saint, virtually confined to religious security, had troubling temptations to disbelief: “I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism,” she acknowledged.

On the other hand, the famous novelist William Somerset Maugham lived as a staunch agnostic until he faced death, when he was overcome by a powerful temptation to believe in a God who would judge him. He called a friend to reassure him that God did not exist.

We are all human, cut from the same cloth, so to speak. However, we drift apart and lose sight of our essential ambiguity. We are not creatures of pure faith, nor creatures of pure doubt. We are a mixture of both, in different proportions.

If Pope Benedict