What are the Vatican’s objectives in Cuba?

What are the Vatican's objectives in Cuba?
BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
elblogdemontaner.com

Raúl Castro traveled to the Vatican and met with Pope Francis. Their
conversation, behind closed doors, apparently was very satisfactory for
the Cuban dictator. He declared that, if the pope stayed the same, "I'll
go back to praying and go back to the Church." After all, he added, "I
was always in Jesuit schools."

Despite that opportunistic promise of a return to the faith, this was
really a meeting between two heads of state, not between religious
brethren. Raúl is the president of a communist nation, and the pope,
aside from his status as head of the Roman Catholic Church, is the
monarch of a miniscule state legitimized after the Lateran Accords
signed in 1929 between Mussolini and a representative of Pius XI.

Pope Francis, as a chief of state, is a kind of king endowed with
absolute powers, elected by a small number of cardinals, while Raúl is a
president, also endowed with absolute power, supposedly selected by the
Council of State (in reality by his brother Fidel), a miniscule group of
deputies (many of them military officers) in the National Assembly of
the People's Power, whose members are chosen in single-party elections.

Strictly speaking, the authority enjoyed by these two figures has
nothing to do with the plural and open processes of liberal democracy.
That may explain the Vatican's traditional frigidity in the face of an
absence of freedoms. That is why Rome could sign concordats with
Franco's Spain in 1953 and with the blood-stained government of Rafael
Trujillo's Dominican Republic in 1954. To neither country did Pope Pius
XII demand a change in conduct in order to sign agreements. The
objectives of the church were of another nature.

What are those objectives? Specifically, the Catholic Church engages in
three basic functions: to spread the Gospel, to educate, and to
participate actively and publicly in the moral debate within society.

To this, it adds a clear emphasis on the exercise of charity, an
activity that functions as the institution's grand earthly mission and
as a cohesive element that keeps it united.

The three tasks are intimately linked, but developing any of them
requires, at the very least, the neutrality of the state, which forces
the institution into a certain painful obsequiousness, an attitude of
complacency with power that emerged centuries ago in the church's
formative period.

Ever since, the church has been part of the state or has placed itself
next to the state, sometimes in vile tasks, such as the Inquisition, but
has almost never confronted the state, even if the latter is manifestly
criminal.

That's not its nature. Its kingdom, it says, is not of this world.

It is true that Pope Francis has every good intention of helping Cubans
solve many of their material problems, but, judging from the jubilation
with which Castro has greeted his mediation and support, the Havana
regime deems the Holy See's behavior as an advantageous factor in its
political project to consolidate a neo-communist dictatorship with a
single party and a mixed economy, an even more conservative variant of
the Chinese experiment.

It is likely that the church hierarchy in Rome (or Cardinal Jaime Ortega
in Cuba) is not excessively worried by the strengthening of a
neo-communist model along the Chinese ideological lines, but I fear that
this could negatively affect those who aspire to a democratic change on
the island, similar to the one that took place in Eastern Europe.

Those Cubans want a transition to a liberal democracy, not to a
single-party capitalist dictatorship like the ones in China and Vietnam.
Evidently, the pope is satisfied with that outcome. And that's lamentable.

Source: What are the Vatican's objectives in Cuba? | Miami Herald Miami
Herald - http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article20781009.html