I tend to agree with the Washington Post on this one. Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba benefits the Vatican, and Fidel and Raul Castro. The Cuban people, not so much.
When Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, he called for the island nation “to open to the world and for the world to open to Cuba.The article goes on to say how weak churchgoing is in Cuba, despite the fact that an estimated 4 million came to see La Caridad as the statue toured the island in the last 15 months.
Pope Benedict XVI now will walk in that wider doorway.
The official reason for the trip is pastoral. Just weeks before his 85th birthday, Benedict is mustering his strength to bring encouragement to the Cuban flock after his first stop in Mexico this week.
The pope will bless the patroness of Cuba, La Caridad, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, on the 400th anniversary of her statue found floating in the sea.
Well sure church going is weak in Cuba. Cubans threw the Catholic Church off their backs along with the Spanish priests associated with pre-1898 repressive rule a long, long time before Fidel Castro was even born. Even I regularly burn a candle of La Caridad – and I am not, and have never been Catholic.
Culture and religion are not the same thing. And in the case of the Catholic Church and Cuba, something the Vatican has never quite gotten a hold of.
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