Pope Francis's Gift to Fidel

On his recent visit to Cuba, Pope Francis went to see the dictator Fidel Castro. Some media outlets (especially those friendly to that government) described a very cordial meeting in which the Pope and Fidel talked about the environment.

What those same outlets did not report was the very special gift Pope Francis gave the elderly Fidel Castro.

I think the Pope chose that gift with a very deliberate intention, because it is no ordinary present. It is not a picture of the Vatican, a commemorative coin, a set of stamps, a rosary or a map (the kind of gifts customarily given at the Vatican’s diplomatic meetings).

For Fidel Castro, who draws closer every day to his own judgment, Pope Francis chose a book and two CDs with homilies and songs by Father Armando Llorente, the Spanish Jesuit who was his schoolteacher and who, before he died, prayed for the conversion of his former pupil.

Incidentally, very few people in Cuba know Father Llorente’s story, and even fewer have been able to read his book, because he has been erased from Cuban history and the book is censored on the island.

According to the Catholic news site www.aciprensa.com, Father Llorente taught Fidel Castro at the Colegio de Belén in Havana, where the Cuban leader studied at the age of 16.

The site recalls that in 2007, in an interview with the Efe agency from Miami, where the priest went into exile when the Castro regime persecuted the Church, he said that if Fidel Castro “in a moment of lucidity” called him or asked to see him, he was ready to go “immediately” to hear his confession.

“The first thing we would do is give each other a tremendous hug and laugh remembering the adventures we had together, which were countless and very beautiful,” he told Efe, and then he would say to him: “Fidel, the moment of truth has come.”

The priest said he still longed to absolve Castro if he asked “forgiveness publicly, because his sins are not only personal,” and repented “of all the harm he has done.”

Father Llorente told Efe that his school years were Fidel’s happiest, because until then “he had not felt loved by anyone”; he was full of “complexes and traumas” from knowing he was the son of an extramarital relationship between his father, Ángel Castro, and Lina Ruz, who worked in the house as a maid.

In December 1958, Father Llorente reached the Sierra Maestra posing as a cattle rancher in order to meet Castro during the revolution. “He confessed to me that he had lost his faith, and I answered: ‘Fidel, losing your faith is one thing and losing your dignity is another,’” he recalled.

In those years Father Llorente helped establish on the island the Agrupación Católica Universitaria (ACU), a Jesuit-inspired youth movement founded in the 1930s. He had to leave Cuba in 1961 because of the Castro regime’s harassment of the Catholic Church, and he set up the ACU in the United States.

He lived in Miami until his death on April 28, 2010, at the age of 91. The Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, said of him that he was an eloquent teacher of Ignatian spirituality and of life according to the Gospel.

I tell you sincerely that when I saw the photo of Pope Francis’s meeting with Fidel Castro, and learned about the very special gifts the Pope brought him, it looked to me like a visit to give the last rites.

God grant that Fidel has time to read the book, listen to the songs, weep with sorrow for his sins, confess to a priest and ask forgiveness publicly, as Father Llorente asked him to. All of that before he dies.

I don’t know whether he will have time, because time is very short. And I don’t know whether his pride will let him, because they say the worst sin is pride, all the more so in men who think they are all-powerful.

I ask God that he may have enough time, and that the Holy Spirit may grant him humility, for the good of his soul.