The meeting between Pope Francis I and Patriarch Kirill in Havana, Cuba was a crucial step to reviving the defense of Christian civilization in East and West, Anthony Salvia, former Reagan administration foreign policy adviser told Sputnik on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Anthony Salvia was special advisor to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under US President Ronald Reagan and is now a partner at the Global Strategic Communications Group.

“The two leaders recognized “the threats faced by both churches — secularism, moral relativism, consumerism, the demographic crisis of the pan-European world, hedonism… and the rise of radical Islam, including efforts to impose Sharia law on people who want nothing to do with it.”

The Holy See has long understood that the crisis of Western civilization — stems directly from the rupture between Rome and the East in year 1054, Salvia explained.

“There is not the slightest evidence that the Vatican — or the Patriarchate — allowed itself to be used. The meetings and subsequent communiqué were very much in the interest of all concerned.”

The meeting in Havana was the fruit of decades of Vatican diplomacy going back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and was also a key objective of Pope Benedict XVI, Salvia observed.

He also recalled the saying of Pope John Paul II that Christian Europe was “an organism that breathes with two lungs: the Latin West and the Byzantine East.”

Salvia praised the joint communiqué of the Pope and Patriarch as a strong and moving expression of concern for the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

“[The communiqué] is highly inconvenient for the perpetrators of Western policy in the region: If Syrian Christians uniformly support Bashar al-Assad, why is the West supporting radical Islamist forces that seek to overthrow him?”

Salvia also praised the communiqué’s call for peace, compromise and reconciliation, not increased confrontation and conflict, over the Ukraine crisis.

“Regarding Ukraine, the communiqué calls for reconciliation… This is not a message proponents of Western global hegemony, who fear reconciliation will put an end to anti-Russian sanctions, want to hear.”

The Pope and the Russian Patriarch also called for the overcoming of the “schism” among Orthodox Ukrainian Christians through “existing canonical norms,” and for Catholic communities to contribute to peace and harmony, Salvia added.

“It is one of the ironies of the post-Cold War era that Russia has emerged as the defender of the faith, protector of Christians and exponent of authentic Christian values. The West does not do these things; often it does quite the opposite.”