HAVANA — Pope Francis has added a stop in Cuba to his planned trip to the United States this September, a visit that will highlight his role as a peace broker between the two countries and offer a boost to their efforts to mend relations after 50 years of rancor.

Francis will make a Cuba landing in late September before his previously scheduled stops in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, where he is expected to meet with President Obama and address Congress.

In his much-anticipated document of principle, Pope Francis seems to say that the church must deal with the world it lives in, not the world it wants. He sometimes sounds less like a pontiff than a marriage counselor.
In his much-anticipated document of principle, Pope Francis seems to say that the church must deal with the world it lives in, not the world it wants. He sometimes sounds less like a pontiff than a marriage counselor. The Associated Press

No further details of Francis’s Cuba plans were given by the Vatican. At a news conference in Brussels, where he has been meeting with European Union officials, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez confirmed the pope’s visit, but there was no further statement from the Cuban government.

Whatever his plans, Francis will almost certainly be received warmly by a Cuban public that has shown a great deal of enthusiasm for papal visits in the past, if less so for the habit of disciplined church attendance.

With near-universal support among ordinary Cubans for reconciliation with the United States, Francis will give an important political boost to the only significant independent institution on the island – Cuba’s Catholic Church – and its role in nudging communist authorities toward broader reforms.

Francis’s stop in Cuba would be the third Vatican trip there since the Castro government ceased to be officially atheist. Pope John Paul II made a groundbreaking visit in 1998, and in 2012 Pope Benedict celebrated Mass to large outdoor audiences in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city.

Francis helped facilitate the secret conversations between Cuban officials and the Obama administration that culminated in the announcement in December that the two Cold War foes would re-establish diplomatic relations severed by Washington in 1962.

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