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Good morning. This week sixty years ago, an American U-2 spy plane took photographs over Cuba providing evidence that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear weapons capable of striking US cities. The resulting thirteen days of the Cuban missile crisis took the world to the brink of nuclear war.

This weekend, President Biden remarked that, in the war in Ukraine, the risk of a nuclear Armageddon was at its highest level since those days of 1962. Fearing rhetoric leads to escalation, President Macron responded that ‘we must speak with prudence’ on such matters.

The escalation of war isn’t just about what happens on the battlefield it’s also about what influences leaders, in which religion can play a role. At the heart of the Cuban crisis were Nikita Khrushchev, who chaired a communist party that was aggressively anti-religion, and John F. Kennedy the first Catholic elected President. Kennedy’s faith was private and complex, negotiating a context of prejudice against Catholics and the formal separation of church and state. However, there is an argument that this faith tempered his firm response to Khrushchev with an overriding hope for peace.

As the crisis deepened, with the US naval blockade, Kennedy sent a private message to Pope John XXIII. The Pope contacted both American and Soviet embassies, urging negotiations to spare the world from the horrors of war with the headline ‘We beg all governments not to remain deaf to this cry of humanity’. This was used in newspapers around the world including the Soviet Communist Pravda. When the Soviet ships turned around without crossing the blockade, they did so for a whole number of complex political factors and deals, but Khrushchev would later acknowledge the role of the Pope. The Pope had given him a way out to be seen as a statesman of peace rather than someone forced to back down.

It’s a long way from a naval blockade of Cuba to the annexing of territory in Ukraine, yet the role of religion shouldn’t be overlooked. Christianity has been and currently is being used in Russia to baptise nationalism, reinforcing myths and prejudices - the danger being escalation and no way out. But its real and at times mysterious power is the way that it can subvert such things and in the hope of peace give new possibilities. A recently discovered private letter from Dr Martin Luther King to Kennedy following the Cuban crisis, commends the President for his firm response but also using ‘some of the elements of non-violent creativity in international conflict’ which for Dr King opened up spiritual power.

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