Fidel and Religion

by T.P. Wilkinson / December 3rd, 2016

Thirty years ago while in Sao Paulo, I interviewed Frei Betto, a Dominican who in his journalistic capacity had just published a series of interviews with Fidel Castro. Frei Betto had been imprisoned under the Brazilian military dictatorship—the one instigated by the US under that paragon of liberalism, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and coordinated by the US ambassador and then under official cover as military attaché, the regime’s veteran coup manager, Vernon Walters. In 1986 the military had been persuaded to relinquish formal power to a civilian constitutional government.

This was the era before pope emeritus Benedict XVI—Cardinal inquisitor Joseph Ratzinger—had finished purging the Roman Catholic Church of that plague known as “liberation theology”. While Ratzinger, a child of National Socialism who started his career under the arch-fascist papacy of Pius XII, was trying overtly and covertly to convince Latin Americans that their rich fascist co-religionists were belonged as much to the “deserving poor” as those they oppressed and assassinated with death squads, liberals in Europe and North America were trying to reconcile themselves to the movements of Catholics allied to communists in their struggle for justice.

Frei Betto’s book was provocative because he sought to show that the “devil” in the Western Hemisphere himself was not the atheist persecutor of the Church and religion he was portrayed to be. Of…

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