I can’t help by see the contrast between this papal tolerance and Obama’s trip to Notre Dame and Georgetown where an image of Christ in a Catholic institution was found intolerable and thus dutifully covered by Obama’s salivating clerics.

Are we to accept that the corrupt thinking of “Saint Che” will lead us into the promised land?

Don L, one answer to your question is that perhaps these Marxists know they have lost, whereas the Sandanistas thought they could still win. These Marxists will become capitalists who sell Che T-shirts and will bide their time for another day, with perhaps different allies.

To Kyle, did either B XVI or JP II offer up Mass next to a portrait of that murderer Che? Are there photographs? I ask that not as a challenge but as a genuine inquiry – I do not know.

Paul and Don L, I think they’ve come to realize that they cannot hold on much longer as communists. I think they’ve come to see that the quasi-Marxism of the American intellectual works much better (for now). So I see their recent moves as a kind of fictional surrender. They actually have lost, in the sense that they know the old ways are going to fail. So why not morph into something more ‘acceptable’? I know it can be argued that is not really losing, but I see it as hard to argue that Fidel’s way is passing. The Sandanistas have already made this transition.
–
And yes, I agree: the Cuban leadership and the Sandanistas are enemies of the church and will continue to seek her destruction. No doubt about it. I’ve always said: thank God that Lenin and Stalin were puritans, because if they were American-style hedonists the commies might have won the Cold War.

Tom D
If I see your point– a softer name change is the game.

I would still hold that with Putin able to be so recklessly emboldened, the Chinese getting rich off of us and taking the South China seas for their own playground, while we hardly whimper and keep doing business, our Iran fold, and Obama showing instantly erasable red lines and “flexibility, they are laughing at the once proud West (and Judeo-Christian ideas about man)

From what I remember reading, Che was in Bolivia when the CIA cornered him, captured him and killed him. the other thing I remember reading is that Guevara was part of an Argentine family that all hated the United States and that Guevara died like a coward.

To be blunt, the Castros are failures. Their island is a tropical gulag. Oh, Fidel is wealthy beyond belief, praised by the International Left, has inspired leftist insurrections throughout Latin America, managed to convince the Western capitalist countries to loan him money that he hasn’t paid back, managed to get the UN to ignore his horrid human rights violations, but his puny revolution is a failure. He remains in power because Kennedy backed down to Khruschev and agreed not to get rid of Castro. His is nothing but a cult of personality. The Cuban armed forces would not last a month, maybe not even a week, against the US and everybody knows it.

Having said that, I’m tired of the Roman Pontiffs going to Cuba. Castro is a criminal and a monster and should be treated exactly like the nutjob in charge of North Korea.

Bluntly, this pontiff is a very stupid man—the most charitable way of putting it, regarding things that he does. Tom D. is right on target: Today’s communists do not want to make martyrs (They know the value of “martyrs” — look at Lenin’s Tomb, look at “useful idiot” US journali John Reed and for God’s sake, look at the murderer and brigand, Che, who is lionized here with PF’s useful acquiescence.):
…
The boring murdering goes on by driving people out of the cake-making business, out of the coal- or fracking-business, driving them out of small businesses, even driving them out of harvesting the ocean (cf. Drakes’ Bay Oster Company), a once safe source of income and means.
In a previous age, these people were called “kulaks.” But that was too messy, too obvious.