(MintPress)— Pope Benedict XVI marked the end of his three-day trip to Cuba Wednesday, celebrating Mass and delivering a homily calling for change in the country to hundreds of thousands in Havana’s Revolution Plaza Wednesday.
“Cuba and the world need change,’’ he said, “but this will only be accomplished if each of us asks ourselves the truth and decides to take the path of love, planting seeds of reconciliation and brotherhood,” the pope said.
The pope was subtly critical of Cuba’s government during his visit, encouraging Cuba to find new alternatives to communism.
Points of Allignment
However, despite a tenuous history between the church and country, President Raul Castro, in welcoming the pope earlier this week, professed Cuba’s respect for religion.
Castro pointed out that the government shares values with the church, and that capitalism was suffering from a “systemic crisis” fueled by “excessive selfishness in opulent societies”.
The pope has also made comments disparaging a global economy that he feels is at “deep moral and spiritual crisis” fueled by excessive selfishness.
There are points at which the goals of Cuba’s communist government and the teachings of the church intersect though.
The access of individuals to health care has been an important issue taken up by Catholics, stemming from church ideology on the dignity of the human person, embedded in classic Catholic social teaching.
The Cuban government operates a national health system and assumes fiscal and administrative responsibility for the health care of all its citizens. When this system was implemented in the 1960’s improvements in lowering disease and infant mortality rates were noted, and today Cuba has one of the highest life expectancy rates in the region, even greater than that of the US.
Commenting on problems with the US’s consumer-driven health care system, an article in The American Catholic recently pointed out, “The ‘every-man-for-himself,’ radical individualist strategy of American healthcare not only is disastrously irresponsible, it seriously violates basic Christian teaching.”
Room for Improvement
However, the church has been critical of human rights abuses in the Cuba. For example, earlier in the week at a Mass in Santiago de Cuba, security guards hauled away a man who tried to approach the pontiff shouting “down with communism”, and television cameras showed the man being hit in the face by the crowd, once with a gurney by a man wearing a Red Cross vest.
Amnesty International reported that “Cuban human rights activists are facing a surge in harassment in a bid to silence them during the pope’s visit.”
The group documented that 150 dissidents were rounded up and detained by the government and phone lines were cut off during the pope’s visit.
The Church has worked in securing the release of dozens of political prisoners in recent years.
“Short-term detentions of government opponents, human rights activists and independent journalists are routine in Cuba. On the lead up to the Pope’s visit, hundreds of government opponents were detained for short-periods of time, threatened or prevented from travelling freely,” Amnesty International also relayed.
Jorge Dominguez, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told MSNBC “ The church has now been accepted as a legitimate and important interlocutor of the government on sensitive topics like freeing political prisoners, the conditions of those in prison, the treatment of dissidents. This is a wholly unprecedented role for the Roman Catholic in Cuba for the past half century.”
And despite its anti-communist stance, the Catholic church has helped the most impoverished members of Cuban society via setting up food banks, retirement homes and medicine distribution centers.
No Plans for Political Change in Cuba
“I have entrusted to the Mother of God the future of your country, advancing along the ways of renewal and hope, for the greater good of all Cubans. I have also prayed to the Virgin for the needs of those who suffer, of those who are deprived of freedom, those who are separated from their loved ones or who are undergoing times of difficulty,” the Associated Press quoted the pope as saying Tuesday, while visiting a sanctuary in the small Cuban town of El Cobre.
But Cuban government officials say they have no plans for political change, despite the Pope’s pleas.
Marino Murillo, vice president of the Council of Ministers told reporters in response to the pope’s charge “in Cuba there will not be political reform”.
The church has also called upon the US to end its embargo which was imposed on Cuba in 1962.
“The Holy See maintains that the embargo is something for which the people suffer the consequences and which does not reach the aim of promoting the greater good,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told Catholic News Service.
“The Vatican’s position on economic embargoes — not just the embargo against Cuba, but even briefer embargoes against Iraq and Libya — has been repeated many times and is explained in the official Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” the report went on to spell out.
While the church has ruled that international sanctions could be a legitimate and potentially effective means of trying to pressure oppressive governments to change, it has called upon those bodies imposing sanction to “act in a way that is both reasonable and motivated by concern for people, especially a society’s weakest members, classic Catholic social doctrine places conditions on the use of sanctions.”
The church further has stated that the purpose of sanctions “must be clearly defined” and regularly evaluated by the international community “as to their effectiveness and their real impact on the civilian population.”
The Cuban government gave workers the day off and closed schools Wednesday, encouraging attendance at the Mass, despite a contentious history between religious people and the Cuban government.
The Pope touted the importance of securing religious freedom during his visit, saying, “The right to freedom of religion, both in its private and in its public dimension, manifests the unity of the human person, who is at once a citizen and a believer. It also legitimizes the fact that believers have a contribution to make to the building up of society. Strengthening religious freedom consolidates social bonds, nourishes the hope of a better world, creates favorable conditions for peace and harmonious development, while at the same time establishing solid foundations for securing the rights of future generations.”
Strained Past Relations
The Catholic church’s relations with the country became strained under the communist government implemented by Fidel Castro in the early 1960’s. Under Castro, the church was ostracized and believers were punished.
This caused Pope John XXIII to excommunicated Castro, who was raised as a Roman Catholic, in 1962.
The country officially described itself as atheist until the 1990’s, when the government loosened its ideology, and began describing itself as secular, rather than atheist.
Castro also permitted church-going Catholics to join the Cuban Communist Party at that time.
Now that Fidel Castro has stepped down from leading the country, his younger brother, Raul, who in charge, has been viewed as more accepting of the Catholic church.
Roughly half of the Cuba’s 11.2 million people identify themselves as Catholics, according to a study done last year by the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Source: MintPress