RELIGION-CUBA: Catholic Church Still Waiting

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jul 5 1998 (IPS) - The Cathlic Church said the changes in its relations with the Cuban state hoped for in the wake of Pope John Paul II’s historic visit had not yet arrived.

“Practically everything is the same,” said the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic education, Cardinal Pio Laghi, the first Vatican envoy to visit Cuba after the Pope’s Jan. 21-25 visit.

The Church has continued to request “more space, above all with respect to its pastoral mission, our main mission,” Laghi said in a brief meeting with the press before returning to Rome.

The Pope’s envoy visited Cuba Jul. 26-30 to discuss the question of education, one of the touchiest issues of Church-state relations in Cuba, with clergy, lay Catholics and government officials.

Laghi met with the ministers of Education and Superior Education, Luis Ignacio Gomez and Fernando Vecino Alegret, as well as Caridad Diego, a member of the Council of State and the head of the governing Communist Party’s Office of Religious Affairs.

President Fidel Castro attended a reception offered by papal nuncio Beniamino Stella on Tuesday night, a few hours after Laghi’s departure.

There was no public indication that Castro and Laghi met, nor was any favourable gesture by the government to the Church’s petition for the re-opening of Catholic schools announced.

Laghi said he had asked for the release of four members of the Working Group of the Internal Dissidence, who have been in custody for around a year. “We asked about them, but did not receive any concrete response,” he told reporters.

The Castro government released 200 inmates in February, including both common and political prisoners, in response to a request by the Pope. Inenal opposition sources commented, however, that the decision did not entail any change of policy.

The Church’s request for permission to reopen Catholic schools – closed with all other private educational institutions in the early years of the revolution in the 1960s – threatens to become a new source of tension.

John Paul II said in the first sermon he delivered on his visit to Cuba that Christian families had the duty to insist on their right to choose the pedagogical style, ethical and civic content and religious denomination in which they wanted their children to be brought up.

“Religious formation, in schools and other settings of civil society, in no way enters into contradiction with the lay character of the modern state,” said Laghi during mass on Monday marking the saint’s day of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

“The secular character of the state is precisely what provides a guarantee not to intervene in, privilege, or limit the religious education freely chosen by the educational community, which is comprised of the family, the school and the Church,” said the prefect.

The government believes Catholic education would become a privileged alternative in an educational system based on the universal right to equal educational opportunities for all citizns.

Besides its demands in the area of education, the Catholic Church wants access to the media, visas for a larger number of foreign clergy and lay workers, and possibilities for broadening its work in society.

Laghi said that for the moment no progress had been made on those demands. But he added that the Conference of Catholic Bishops and local authorities were in contact to prevent fresh outbreaks of tension.

On Jun. 9, John Paul II urged Cuba’s bishops, who were visiting him in Rome, to spread his message in Cuba to allow it to give “abundant fruit.”