NEWS STORY: Pope calls on Cubans to embrace family values, condemns abortion

c. 1998 Religion News Service SANTA CLARA, Cuba _ Magnolia Martinez spent part of Thursday (Jan. 22) balancing on railroad tracks overlooking a dusty athletic field here listening to Pope John Paul II speak of the importance of family. And Martinez, a”believer but not a Catholic,”cried. Martinez, 66, who cleans government buildings for a living, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

SANTA CLARA, Cuba _ Magnolia Martinez spent part of Thursday (Jan. 22) balancing on railroad tracks overlooking a dusty athletic field here listening to Pope John Paul II speak of the importance of family.

And Martinez, a”believer but not a Catholic,”cried.


Martinez, 66, who cleans government buildings for a living, said her tears were for her family, now mostly dead. Catching a distant glimpse of the pope, and hearing his amplified words over the stadium’s loudspeaker system, she said, were”so important for me, so important for Cubans.” In the first of four homilies at papal Masses the pope will deliver during his five-day visit to Cuba, John Paul mixed religion and politics, strongly criticizing the Cuban government’s policy of providing widespread legal abortion and calling for the reopening of Catholic schools nationalized by the government in the 1960s.

Cuban families, said the Roman Catholic leader, who arrived in Cuba Wednesday, face special challenges. They live, he said,”in economic or cultural systems which, under the guise of freedom and progress, promote and even defend an anti-birth mentality … there is even an acceptance of abortion, which is always, in addition to being an abominable crime, a senseless impoverishment of the person and of society itself.” Turning to the subject of Catholic schools, John Paul continued:”The family, the school and the church must form an educational community in which the children of Cuba can grow in humanity,”he said, sitting beneath a newly constructed wood-frame and thatched roof overhang shading him from the tropical sun.”Do not be afraid: open your families and schools to the values of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which are never a threat to any social project.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The site of the pope’s challenge to the policies of Cuban President Fidel Castro gave it added poignancy.

Manuel Fajardo Physical Education Institute stadium sits below a hill topped by a memorial to famed revolutionary Ernesto”Che”Guevara, who in December 1958 led a guerrilla force that won a decisive victory here in the revolution bringing Castro to power.

Guevara’s forces ambushed a government troop train traveling along the very rail bed that Magnolia Martinez stood upon to catch her glimpse of the pope in the stadium below here. Just below the Guevara memorial a large painting of John Paul had been erected.

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Martinez was among the approximately 100,000 Cubans who attended the papal Mass in Santa Clara, a city of 200,000 some 180 miles southeast of Havana. Just 40 percent of Cuba’s 11 million people are baptized Catholics and only about 500,000 attend church with any regularity, making the Mass a new experience for many in the crowd.

The missal, or booklet containing the order of the Mass, reflected the reality of the Cuban Catholic Church’s minority status in this Marxist nation. In addition to the usual liturgical text, the missal also included instructions about how those in what John Paul called this”immense open-air church”were expected to respond.

The receiving of Holy Communion also was restricted to those who had signed up in advance and could show they were practicing Catholics.


Cuba, for many years under Castro an officially atheistic nation, now reclassified as secular, is a land in which religious practice for many of those who profess faith, is an amalgam of Afro-Cuban folk religions and Catholicism. Adding to the mix is the growing number of Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant churches, which attract about the same number of Sunday worshippers as the Catholic churches.

Syncretism was evident at the papal Mass. One 36-year-old man in the crowd wearing a Church of the Nazarene T-shirt, for example, said he attended a Catholic church in Sagua la Grande, about 30 miles from Santa Clara, but was not Catholic.

The man declined to give his name, saying he felt uncomfortable talking publicly about his beliefs, a common sentiment in this authoritarian state.”We are in Cuba,”he said, as others crowded around him listened intently and nodded in agreement.

Michael Reyes, 15, a high school student who also attended the Mass, called himself a”believer but not a Catholic”whose family practices the popular Afro-Cuban faith known as Santeria, which combines worship of traditional African deities and the veneration of Catholic saints.

Yet seeing John Paul”moved something in me,”said Reyes.”I believe the pope represents God and that makes me feel good.” However, the majority of several dozen persons interviewed during the Mass _ whatever their personal religious beliefs _ seemed to respond most to the pope’s comments about the importance of strong family life.

John Paul spoke of the”traumatic”separation from family members who have immigrated to the United States and elsewhere. He spoke of Cubans being forced by economic circumstances to live apart from their families and a high rate of divorce in Cuba.”All of this has a profoundly negative impact on young people,who are called to embody authentic moral values for the building of a better society,”the pope said.


Calling marriage”sacred because its origin is in God”the pontiff urged couples to stay together”forever.””If the human person is the center of every social institution, then the family, the first setting for socialization, must be a community of free and responsible persons who live marriage as a project of perfect love, evermore perfectable, and which contributes vitality and energy to civil society,”he said.

Standing not far from Magnolia Martinez on the railroad tracks, Aerlis Santana, a 46-year-old optometrist, draped her arm around her husband and young son as she listened to the pope’s words.”This is the best thing the pope could have said today,”said Santana, a practicing Catholic.”There is too much divorce and abortion in Cuba. This will help Cubans be better people.” Near her, Carlos Trujillo, a 32-year-old attorney, agreed that”what the pope says here about values is most important. It’s needed by the Cuban people.” But will the papal visit affect real change in Cuba, moral or otherwise?”I believe in Christ as a messenger of hope,”said Trujillo, who was attending his first Mass and although baptized Catholic was”not a real Christian”because he does not attend church.”Who knows what will come next?”

DEA END RIFKIN

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