WHEN POPE FRANCIS CAME TO CUBA - 1 OF 2
In pursuit of the truth - http://www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com - Friday, Sep. 25, 2015
BY CARLOS EIRE IS THE T. L. RIGGS PROFESSOR OF CATHOLIC STUDIES AT YALE UNIVERSITY
Preface: First of all, Pope Francis is no St. John Paul II. Pope Francis has the mind of the contemporary Jesuits in South America. The two previous popes had serious problems with the Jesuits. GHK - What follows are the views of T.L.Riggs. Excerpts:
"A few months ago, when Pope Francis visited Ecuador and Bolivia, Pope Francis mingled with presidents Rafael Correa and Evo Morales, avowed disciples of Fidel and Raul Castro with tyrannical tendencies, but he refrained from speaking about their human rights abuses. He also received a blasphemous hammer-and-sickle crucifix from Evo Morales and accepted this gift with a smile. What if that crucifix had been in the shape of a swastika rather than a hammer & sickle?
That incident was a portent of things to come in Cuba, where Pope Francis has smiled his way through meetings with blood-soaked tyrants and failed to speak out about human rights abuses on the island, or to challenge the cruelty of his hosts. Pope Francis also failed to meet with any of Cuba's non-violent dissidents, despite their urgent pleas for an encounter. This is not so much the preferential option for the poor" as the preferential option for oppressors.
Havana's Cardinal laime Ortega y Alamino explained this approach by saying that the Catholic Church in Cuba had to avoid "partisan politics." This is the same prince of the Church who has called for the arrest of asylum-seeking dissidents in his churches, and in April of 2012, at Harvard University, ridiculed these persecuted Cubans as "former delinquents" and "people with psychological disturbances" who lacked "any cultural level." Despite his frequent calls for "reconciliation," Ortega has referred to Cuban exiles as "gusanos" (worms or maggots), the unchristian epithet that the Castro regime has applied for over half a century.
The papal entourage eventually decided to give in to the dissidents' plea for a meeting at the last minute, as an afterthought, but the results were predictably disastrous. When some democracy advocates were suddenly and unexpectedly invited to meet with Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature in Havana all of them were arrested as soon as they left their homes. In addition, many other non-violent dissidents were rounded up or placed under arrest, to prevent them from attending the pope's open-air Mass.
Meanwhile, the Castro regime sent busloads of its own-hand-picked supporters to the papal Mass, to ensure that Pope Francis would have sufficiently large audience of politically-correct Cubans. Worst of all, the selection process for those who were crammed into those buses was vetted at the parish level by the Cuban Catholic Church, and approved by its bishops.
When four dissidents somehow managed to get close to Pope Francis, despite the efforts of church and state to keep all such Cubans away from him, they were quickly attacked by plain-clothed state security agents and whisked away to prison. Has Pope Francis denounced these injustices, which amount to religious persecutions? Has he voiced concern over the compliance of his bishops in this persecution? No. Not a word. His silence is deafeaning.
The Holy Father's homily on Sunday, in Havana, focused on the vulnerable members of society, and it could have been delivered anywhere on earth. His sermon was full of beautiful sentiments., but there was very little in it about Cuba, and nothing whatsoever about the suppression, vulnerability, and poverty of the Cuban people. This sermon displayed non of the sharp-edged subtlety favored by his own Jesuit order. It was far too subtle. So subtle, in fact, that only someone with a doctoral degree in theology, rhetoric, or political science might be able to detect any reference to injustice in it.
As Newsweek has observed, seventeen years ago in his homily in Havana, John Paul ll mentioned "freedom" seventeen times and "justice" thirteen times. In his homily, Francis did not mention "freedom" or "justice" once. All that Francis said about Cubans was that they are "a people which has its wounds, like every other people." In other words Francis told Cubans that they were no worse off than any other people on earth after fifty-six years of economic and political repression, and that they really have nothing to complain about. ...
GEORGE H. KUBECK
No comments:
Post a Comment