The Pope and the President

Politicians from anywhere in the world can have no illusions about their ability to “persuade” a pope. This obviously applies to U.S. presidents, even after World War II, when the United States has become the undisputed leader of Western civilization.

Pope Francis is in the United States for his first visit, and President Barack Obama hopes to reap the benefits by selecting what he has in common with the supreme pontiff, emphasizing the fight against global warming and social inequality (essential points of the Democratic election platform in 2016). Obama, a president who likes the pulpit, knows, however, that he cannot have the pretension of teaching the “Lord’s Prayer” to the vicar. Moreover, there are differences on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Basically, between Francis’s Vatican and Obama’s White House, there is an alignment in some policies. The two shouldn’t pave a new path and they cannot come near to forging an alliance in the style of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in the 1980s.

They both forged history in the fight against Communism and the fall of the Soviet empire. In their direct meetings and through their advisers, they had “one of the greatest secret alliances” in history, in the words of Richard Allen, who was Reagan’s national security adviser. The former U.S. president called the USSR an “evil empire,” while for the Polish pope, hostility toward Communism was visceral.

And the focus of the joint operation was precisely Poland, one of the Soviet satellites in the Cold War, in the account of Carl Bernstein, one of the two reporters of Watergate fame. They agreed to undertake a clandestine campaign to speed the dissolution of the Communist empire, using resources to destabilize the Polish government and to support the Solidarity union led by Lech Walesa.

The pope had tremendous spiritual power, particularly in Eastern Europe, while Reagan collaborated vigorously with his muscle through a military escalation that exhausted the Soviets.

We are in another moment in history, and nothing is more ironic than the fact that one of the points in common between Obama and Francis is their effort toward the rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, a dilapidated Communist Jurassic Park.