Pope Francis and the New Roman Empire

History sometimes turns on little things– a single bullet, a spy’s blurry photograph–and on Aug. 25, 2014, Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino of Havana arrived at the White House to deliver one such object. Ortega had gone to great lengths to cover his tracks. His name does not appear in official White House visitor logs, and he had even arranged an event at Georgetown University that day to explain his presence in the capital. When he arrived at the West Wing he was quickly shown to a secluded patio outside the Oval Office, where President Barack Obama, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and two other top aides greeted him.

After dispensing with the formalities, the Cardinal took out a letter from Pope Francis to Obama. Ortega informed the Americans that he had delivered the same message days earlier in person to Cuban President Raúl Castro. And then Ortega began to read the Pope’s words out loud. Francis expressed his support for diplomatic talks the U.S. and Cuba had secretly been pursuing in an effort to end a half-century of hostility. He encouraged the two nations to resolve the issue of prisoners, a key sticking point in negotiations. And he offered the Vatican’s assistance to help the two countries overcome their decades of distrust and confrontation.

Francis’ letter was as simple as that, but it made a difference. Two months later, Obama and Castro took Francis up on his offer, dispatching top officials to the privacy of the Vatican for a five-hour session in which they hammered out the details of an agreement to restore full diplomatic relations. And when Obama and Castro sealed the historic deal by telephone on Dec. 16, 2014, they found common ground expressing their gratitude to the Pope. Most important, the Pope’s letter offered symbolic shelter for both sides as they weighed the political costs of reconciliation. Francis’ popularity as a religious figure in the U.S. gave Obama cover as he cut a deal with godless communists across the Straits of Florida, while the Pope’s credibility as a Latin American shielded Castro as he got in bed with Yankee capitalists. “[The Cubans] were very clear with us that they saw Pope Francis as different from previous Popes,” says Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was present at the meeting with Ortega and the talks in Rome, “because of his stature as the first Pope from Latin America.”

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