c. 2000 Religion News Service

HAVANA _ A smirking man lounged with three young women in the tropical heat along the massive steel doors separating the seminary from the bustling craft market in Old Havana.

As visitors approached, he would say, “You like these girls,” and the women would smile on cue. To one priest, he named a price: $5.

Inside the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio are the Cuban church’s future leaders, who learned early on not to get upset that prostitutes can operate with impunity outside their doors. The seminarians smile constantly and greet visitors with joyful hugs and two-handed handshakes.

They are the young men who will lead the post-Fidel Castro church. Raised in a more liberal religious environment, and while still facing harassment but not the fear of prison or expulsion experienced by their elders, they appear ready to take a more confrontational stance toward the communist government.

The Cuban church has been attacked and wounded and is in search of space to evangelize, seminarian Esney Munoz told a group of visiting U.S. seminarians and priests from Catholic Relief Services earlier this month.

“Our priesthood should be ecclesial, prophetic, open, mature and missionary,” he said.

There are 77 seminarians in the eight-year program in the Havana seminary. This year, one man will be ordained a priest and one will be ordained a deacon, the final step before priesthood. Right now, only 124 of the nation’s 306 priests serving the island’s 11 million people are native Cubans. The government has allowed a few more foreign priests to enter in recent years, but the church is trying to develop leaders within the country.

It is not an easy life. Some of their friends and family members wonder why they would resign themselves to a meager economic existence at a time when foreign investment and tourist dollars offer more lucrative opportunities.

At the seminary, they get up at 6 for morning prayers and Mass. Breakfast is a bun and coffee. Lunch is rice and beans, and dinner is something simple, such as spaghetti or rice with tiny pieces of chicken lost in a huge bowl.

“They’re going to be sensitive to the needs of the people,” said Christopher Liguori, a visiting seminarian from Boynton Beach, Fla. “They live the same lives as the people.”

On weekends, they go out to the parishes to serve as pastoral assistants. Some will provide comfort to the homeless, who are rousted from makeshift tin homes and forced to move every few weeks by the police.

Others will visit the elderly or do youth work in churches in nearby towns.

James Burgum, a seminarian at St. Mary Seminary in Wickliffe, Ohio, accompanied two Cuban seminarians on their rounds as part of the visiting group of global fellows from Catholic Relief Services. He recalled how the face of a 99-year-old woman who was half-blind and half-deaf lighted up when the seminarians came to see her.

As he observed the Cuban seminarians moving throughout the small town during the weekend, Burgum said, “It’s like they have 100 old friends they were dropping in on.”

In private conversations, some Cuban seminarians say they wish their church would confront the government more over issues such as human rights and greater religious freedoms.

“They certainly seem to have that prophetic fire,” Burgum said.

Surprisingly, what worries them most is whether the passion for dollars created by the island’s burgeoning tourist industry is causing a moral crisis of individualism.

“It is perhaps more a desire of having than having many things,” one seminarian said, but there is a consensus the church faces similar issues of selfishness, materialism and the breakup of families that U.S. seminarians listed as major problems confronting their church.

In listing the qualities they expected of themselves, Cuban seminarians said as priests they aspire to be “men of God, community-oriented, friends, transmitters of peace and Good Samaritans.”

In the end, they have a great sense of hope.

“Ten years from now, we are looking at a growing church,” Munoz said. “The Cuban church is a strong missionary church.”

The Rev. Donald Cozzens, rector of St. Mary Seminary in Wickliffe, said the Cuba seminarians impressed him as warm, friendly, pastoral individuals, but they face powerful historical obstacles.

“It could be that the secular nature of Cuba is strongly embedded in the people, and I think they face a long struggle ahead of them to reach a vibrant Catholic presence throughout Cuba,” he said.

But he encouraged the seminarians not to give up hope.

“I think, in a way, Cuba has had a dark night of the soul for the last 40 years,” Cozzens said. “The priest of the 21st century in Cuba and the United States will be a person of real courage and I think profound authenticity. Respect yourself and each other as brave men committed to the gospel.”

DEA END BRIGGS