The Vatican Missile Crisis – WSJ

The largest legislative body in human history would begin its formal work on Oct. 13, after a day pondering John XXIII’s magisterial opening address. In that 37-minute Latin discourse, the pope challenged the church to heal the wounds of a world that had almost destroyed itself in two world wars—and to do so by proclaiming

Jesus Christ

as the answer to modernity’s quest for an authentic humanism.

As the most consequential event in 500 years of Catholic history began, another historic drama riveted the world’s attention. On Oct. 14, the day after the bishops at Vatican II frustrated the designs of the Roman Curia to control the council’s working committees, a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane photographed new military installations across Cuba. Eight days later, President

John F. Kennedy

informed the world that the Soviet Union had installed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles 90 miles off the American coast—weapons capable of devastating Washington, New York and Chicago. The president demanded their removal and imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba. For the next six days the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. On Oct. 28, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev—whom

Fidel Castro

had urged to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack—agreed to remove the missiles from the island.

This striking coincidence typically goes unremarked. But it had lasting consequences that are evident today. If, for example, one wants to understand why Cardinal

Pietro Parolin,

the Vatican secretary of state, allowed himself to be subjected to lie after outrageous lie from Russian Foreign Minister

Sergei Lavrov

about the war in Ukraine during their meeting at the United Nations General Assembly last month, the beginnings of the answer date to October 1962.

John XXIII and the Vatican’s diplomats were badly shaken by the Cuban missile crisis, not least because of the threat it posed to the council. So the Vatican developed a new approach to Moscow and its satellites. The church ceased all public condemnation of communist persecution. It intensified ecumenical overtures to the Russian Orthodox Church, although its leadership was closely controlled by the KGB. And a veteran Vatican diplomat,

Agostino Casaroli,

began to travel behind the Iron Curtain, seeking accommodations with communist regimes.

Casaroli’s Ostpolitik, as this new policy was dubbed, intensified under John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI. And while students at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy—the Roman graduate school for the Vatican’s future diplomats—are taught today that the Ostpolitik was a great success that helped set the stage for the nonviolent collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, that claim is impossible to sustain given the documentary evidence from Warsaw Pact intelligence archives.

Dissident Catholic clergy and Catholic human-rights activists were demoralized by the Ostpolitik. Some local Catholic hierarchies became de facto subsidiaries of the local Communist Party. Faux-Catholic organizations, ostensibly dedicated to world peace, became instruments of Soviet propaganda. And while the Ostpolitik did little to improve the persecuted church’s situation, Warsaw Pact intelligence services penetrated the Vatican so deeply that communist diplomats and apparatchiks knew exactly what their Vatican interlocutors’ negotiating strategy would be vis-à-vis Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Concurrently, Warsaw Pact moles and collaborators in Rome spread disinformation at Vatican II about influential Catholic leaders the communists detested, such as Hungary’s

József Mindszenty

and Poland’s

Stefan Wyszyński.

It wasn’t the Ostpolitik, the misbegotten child of the Cuban missile crisis, that empowered Catholicism in East and Central Europe to play an important role in the revolution of 1989. It was Pope

John Paul II’s

bold defense of human rights and religious freedom. Yet Ostpolitik 2.0 underwrites the Vatican’s accommodating approach to authoritarian regimes today—as seen in its giving the Chinese Communist Party a voice in the appointment of bishops, the feckless efforts at dialogue with the thug-regimes of

Nicolás Maduro

and

Daniel Ortega,

and the suggestion that the West is to blame for the war in Ukraine.

One hopes the current diamond anniversary will prompt a reconsideration of the historical record—and an examination of conscience about the present.

Mr. Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author, most recently, of “To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II.”