By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – At the end of Pope Francis’ spontaneity-filled meeting with priests, seminarians and religious in the cathedral of Naples, Italy, the vial of dried blood of the city’s patron saint appeared to miraculously liquefy.
After Pope Francis blessed the congregation with the reliquary holding the vial, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples announced, “As a sign that St. Januarius loves the pope, who is Neapolitan like us, the blood is already half liquefied.”
The thousands of people present in the cathedral applauded, but the pope insisted on taking the microphone. “The bishop said the blood is half liquefied,” he said. “It means the saint loves us halfway; we must all convert a bit more, so that he would love us more.”
The blood of the fourth-century martyr is Naples’ most precious relic. The townspeople gauge the saints’ pleasure with them by awaiting the blood’s liquefaction three times a year: in the spring during celebrations of the feast of the transfer of the saint’s relics to Naples; Sept. 19, his feast day; and Dec. 16, the local feast commemorating the averting of a threatened eruption of Mount Vesuvius through the intervention of the saint.
Entering the cathedral, Pope Francis’ white cassock and his arms were yanked repeatedly by priests, seminarians and nuns wanting to touch him or attract his attention. Calmed reigned briefly after the pope reached the altar, but then Cardinal Sepe told the pope that, in accordance with canon law, he had given formal permission for the nuns in Naples’ seven cloistered convents to go out for the day.
The nuns, who had been seated in the sanctuary, broke free, running to the pope, surrounding him, hugging him, kissing his ring and piling gifts on his lap.
“Sisters, sisters, not now, later!” the cardinal shouted over the microphone to no avail. “Look what I have done,” he said, exasperated. “And these are the cloistered ones, imagine what the non-cloistered ones are like! Ay. They’re going to eat him alive.”
When order was restored, Pope Francis stood with several sheets of paper and told the congregation, “I prepared a speech, but speeches are boring.” So, he put the papers aside, sat down and began talking about how Jesus must be at the center of a consecrated person’s life, about life in community, about poverty and mercy.
“The center of your life must be Jesus,” he said. Too often, people – including priests and religious – have a difficulty with a superior or a confrere and that problem becomes the real center of their lives, robbing them and their witness of joy.
Addressing seminarians, he said, “if you do not have Jesus at the center, delay your ordination. If you are not sure Jesus is the center of your life, wait a while in order to be sure.”
Money definitely cannot be the center of the life of a priest or nun, he said. Even a diocesan priest, who does not take vows of poverty, must make sure “his heart is not there” in money.

By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — As Catholics are encouraged to make going to confession a significant part of their lives during Lent, Pope Francis offered some quick tips to help people prepare for the sacrament of penance.
After a brief explanation of why people should go to confession — “because we are all sinners” — the pope listed 30 key questions to reflect on as part of making an examination of conscience and being able to “confess well.”
The guide is part of a 28-page booklet in Italian released by the Vatican publishing house. Pope Francis had 50,000 free copies distributed to people attending his Angelus address Feb. 22, the first Sunday of Lent.
Titled “Safeguard your heart,” the booklet is meant to help the faithful become “courageous” and prepared to battle against evil and choose the good.
The booklet contains quick introductions to Catholic basics: it has the text of the Creed, a list of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. It explains the seven sacraments and includes Pope Francis’ explanation of “lectio divina,” a prayerful way of reading Scripture in order to better hear “what the Lord wants to tell us in his word and to let us be transformed by his Spirit.”
The booklet’s title is based on a line from one of the pope’s morning Mass homilies in which he said Christians need to guard and protect their hearts, “just as you protect your home — with a lock.”
“How often do bad thoughts, bad intentions, jealousy, envy enter?” he asked. “Who opened the door? How did those things get in?”
The Oct. 10, 2014, homily, which is excerpted in the booklet, said the best way to guard one’s heart is with the daily practice of an “examination of conscience,” in which one quietly reviews what bad things one has done and what good things one has failed to do for God, one’s neighbor and oneself.
The questions include:
— Do I only turn to God when I’m in need?
— Do I take attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation?
— Do I begin and end the day with prayer?
— Am I embarrassed to show that I am a Christian?
— Do I rebel against God’s plan?
— Am I envious, hot-tempered, biased?
— Am I honest and fair with everyone or do I fuel the “throwaway culture?”
— In my marital and family relations, do I uphold morality as taught in the Gospels?
— Do I honor and respect my parents?
— Have I refused newly conceived life? Have I snuffed out the gift of life? Have I helped do so?
— Do I respect the environment?
— Am I part worldly and part believer?
— Do I overdo it with eating, drinking, smoking and amusements?
— Am I overly concerned about my physical well-being, my possessions?
— How do I use my time? Am I lazy?
— Do I want to be served?
— Do I dream of revenge, hold grudges?
— Am I meek, humble and a builder of peace?
Catholics should go to confession, the pope said, because everyone needs forgiveness for their sins, for the ways “we think and act contrary to the Gospel.”
“Whoever says he is without sin is a liar or is blind,” he wrote. Confession is meant to be a sincere moment of conversion, an occasion to demonstrate trust in God’s willingness to forgive his children and to help them back on the path of following Jesus, Pope Francis wrote.

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Christianity is not a set of prohibitions, but a “project for life” that can lead to true happiness in building better relationships and a better world, Pope Francis told Catholic young people.
“Do you realize how much you are worth in the eyes of God?” the pope asked youths in his annual message for local celebrations of World Youth Day. “Do you know that you are loved and welcomed by him unconditionally?” The ability to love and be loved is beautiful and is a key to happiness, but sin means it also can be “debased, destroyed or spoiled” by selfishness or the desire for pleasure or power, he said in the message, published Feb. 17 at the Vatican.
In preparation for the next international celebration of World Youth Day, which will be held in Krakow, Poland, July 25-Aug. 1, 2016.
The Poland gathering will focus on the beatitude from St. Matthew’s Gospel, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” The 2015 theme chosen by Pope Francis is the beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The “beatitude” or blessedness for which God created human beings and which was disrupted by the sin of Adam and Eve “consists in perfect communion with God, with others, with nature and with ourselves,” the pope wrote. God’s “divine light was meant to illuminate every human relationship with truth and transparency.”
But with sin, he said, Adam and Eve’s relationship with each other, with God and with creation changed. “The inner compass which had guided them in their quest for happiness lost its point of reference and the attractions of power, wealth, possessions and a desire for pleasure at all costs led them to the abyss of sorrow and anguish.” God still loved the human creatures he created and still wanted them to find happiness, the pope said, so he send his son to become one of them and to redeem them.
Jesus taught that impurity or defilement was not something that happened because of what someone ate or who they touched, but was something that came from inside the person. Jesus listed “evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness,” the pope said, pointing out that most of the things on the list have to do with a person’s relationship with others.
“We need to show a healthy concern for creation, for the purity of our air, water and food,” the pope told young people, “but how much more do we need to protect the purity of what is most precious of all: our heart and our relationships. This ‘human ecology’ will help us to breathe the pure air that comes from beauty, from true love, and from holiness.” Through prayer, speaking to Jesus ”as you speak to a friend,” and reading the Bible, he said, people can draw closer to God and allow him to purify their hearts, discovering God’s call to live a life of love in marriage, the priesthood or religious life.

Pope Francis greets new Cardinal Berhaneyesus Souraphiel of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, after presenting a red hat to him during a consistory in St. Peter’s Basilica Feb. 14. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – In a Valentine’s Day ceremony to create 20 new cardinals, Pope Francis offered a meditation on Christian love and, especially, what it means for those who guide and minister in the church.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI attended the ceremony, sitting in the front row of St. Peter’s Basilica alongside the already existing members of the College of Cardinals.
Pope Francis’ meditation at the ceremony focused on the famous passage about love from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13:4-7), which begins: “Love is patient, love is kind.”
“All of us, myself first,” should be guided by St. Paul’s words, he said, because every Christian ministry “flows from charity, must be exercised in charity and is ordered toward charity.”
The patience Christian love calls for, he said, is a call to catholicity. “It means being able to love without limits, but also to be faithful in particular situations and with practical gestures. It means loving what is great without neglecting what is small.”
St. Paul says love is “not jealous or boastful” and truly being neither, the pope said, “is surely a miracle of love since we humans – all of us, at every stage of our lives – are inclined to jealousy and pride since our nature is wounded by sin.”
Not being “irritable or resentful” can be a challenge for a pastor, especially when dealing with other clerics, Pope Francis told the new cardinals.
“Charity alone frees us” from the temptation of snapping at others and, especially, from “the mortal danger of pent-up anger, of that smoldering anger which makes us brood over wrongs we have received,” he said. “This is unacceptable in a man of the church.”
St. Paul’s statement that love rejoices over what is right, the pope said, means “those called to the service of governance in the church need to have a strong sense of justice, so that any form of injustice becomes unacceptable, even those which might bring gain to himself or to the church.”
The new cardinals and all Christians, he said, can find a synopsis of their calling in St. Paul’s affirmation that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Christians, the pope said, should be “persons always ready to forgive; always ready to trust, because we are full of faith in God; always ready to inspire hope, because we ourselves are full of hope in God; persons ready to bear patiently every situation and each of our brothers and sisters, in union with Christ, who bore with love the burden of our sins.”
After the new cardinals professed their faith by reciting the Creed and formally swore fidelity and obedience to the pope and his successors, they approached Pope Francis one by one to receive their biretta, their cardinal’s ring and the assignment of a “titular” church in Rome, which makes them part of the Roman clergy.
(Copyright © 2014 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)

UNITED NATIONS (CNS) – The plight of women and girls living in conflict zones who often are targeted for violence, including rape, must be addressed without delay, said an official with the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations.
Msgr. Janusz Urbanczyk, charge d’affaires at the mission, called upon the U.N. Security Council to identify programs “to eradicate this scourge,” in an intervention Jan. 30 as the council discussed challenges to the protection of women and girls in armed conflict and post-conflict settings.
Citing Catholic social teaching on human dignity, Msgr. Urbanczyk said all violence is an affront to that dignity, but that women and girls are particularly vulnerable when violence arises.
He said sexual violence against women “tears at the very fabric of society.”
The Vatican official recalled the words of Pope Francis, who told members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See in an address Jan. 12 that humanity must not overlook the fact that wars involve the crime of rape, which the pope described as “a most grave offense against the dignity of women, who are not only violated in body but also in spirit.”
Msgr. Urbanczyk also pointed to violence perpetrated against women and girls because of their faith.
The Vatican’s U.N. delegation “remains concerned about the continued lack of attention and priority to the protection of women and girls who are targeted and attacked purely because of the faith they profess,” he said. “The lack of focus and priority for protecting them is troubling when Christians face extinction in some regions of the world and in other regions Christian schools for girls are targeted and attacked.
“This is a shared reality of members of all faiths and therefore requires the shared commitment of members of all faiths and governments to condemn and confront such violence,” Msgr. Urbanczyk said.
The kidnapping of girls is of particular concern, he added, because they are often trafficked for sex or labor around the world. “This is an abominable trade that must come to an end. This scourge must be eradicated since it strikes all of us, from the individual families to the entire international community,” he said.
Msgr. Urbanczyk called upon world leaders to “reject the ‘culture of enslavement,’ which is incapable of doing good or pursuing peace and accepts as inevitable the spread of war and violence.”
“We must redouble our efforts to replace this ‘culture’ with a culture of life and peace in which governments and the international community fulfill their fundamental responsibility to protect all people,” he said.

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Violence against women, cultural pressures regarding women’s physical appearance, attitudes that subjugate women or that ignore male-female differences and the growing alienation of women from the church in some parts of the world are themes the Pontifical Council for Culture is set to explore.
The council, whose members are all cardinals and bishops, has chosen to discuss the theme, “Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference,” during its plenary assembly Feb. 4-7. A document outlining the theme was published in late January, and four women involved in writing it joined Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, council president, at a news conference Feb. 2 at the Vatican.
The cardinal announced to the press that he was planning to establish within his office a special group of female consultants to provide women’s opinions and points of view on a variety of issues.
He also noted that if priests had to follow the Jewish rules for a quorum for prayer — 10 men must be present — many of them would not be able to celebrate daily Mass, even though there would be dozens of women present in the church.
The council’s discussion document, drafted by a group of Italian women and women who have lived in Italy for years, looked at the continuing quest to find balance in promoting women’s equality while valuing the differences between women and men; the concrete and symbolic aspects of women’s potential for motherhood; cultural attitudes toward women’s bodies; and women and religion, including questions about their participation in church decision-making.
The council said the theme was chosen “to identify possible pastoral paths, which will allow Christian communities to listen and dialogue with the world today in this sphere,” while recognizing that in different cultures and for individual women the situation will be different.
While cautioning against generalizations, the document rejects the notions that there are no differences between men and women, and that each person “chooses and builds his-her identity; owns him-herself and answers primarily to him-herself.”
In preparing the document and the plenary discussions, the council sought input from women around the world. However, the process was not without criticism, particularly for the English version of a video featuring an Italian actress, Nanci Brilli, asking women to send in their experiences. Many women felt the use of a heavily made-up actress ran counter to the point of seeking input about the real lives of most women. The council quickly took the English version off YouTube.
At the news conference, Brilli said, “as a woman, a professional, a mother, I feel like this is the first time we have been asked for our opinion” by the church. “The women who responded do not want to be cardinals, but want to take part in the discussion.”
Participating for a year in the group that drafted the document, she said, was such a positive experience that it led to a renewal of her faith, but also to a willingness to do the video and open herself to comments. Some people, she said, instead of wanting to dialogue, “felt represented by making insults. That’s their problem.”
Cardinal Ravasi said the reactions from across Europe were mainly positive and garnered a variety of helpful input about women’s concerns, but in Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the United States and Canada, the reaction focused so strongly on the video — and not on women’s concerns and experience — that they decided to pull it.
Everything he’s done, he said, has garnered strong reaction ranging from enthusiasm to “those who even found satanic dimensions” in what he was doing. Some feel a need to take part in a discussion “by yelling,” he said.
In the section on women and the church, the document described “multifaceted discomfort” with images of women that are no longer relevant and with a Christian community that seems to value their input even less than the world of business and commerce does.
Many women, it said, “have reached places of prestige within society and the workplace, but have no corresponding decisional role nor responsibility within ecclesial communities.”
Council members are not proposing a discussion of ordaining women priests, the document said and, in fact, statistics show ordination “is not something that women want.” However, it said, “if, as Pope Francis says, women have a central role in Christianity, this role must find a counterpart also in the ordinary life of the church.”
The vast majority of Catholic women today do not want a bishop’s “purple biretta,” it said, but would like to see church doors open “to women so that they can offer their contribution in terms of skills and also sensitivity, intuition, passion, dedication, in full collaboration and integration” with men in the church.
The preparatory document looked at how much pressure women face regarding their body image and the way women’s bodies are exploited in the media, even to the point of provoking eating disorders or recourse to unnecessary surgery.
“Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the feminine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the ‘season’ that is being lived out,” it said.
“’Plastic surgery is like a burqa made of flesh.’ One woman gave us this harsh and incisive description,” the document said. “Having been given freedom of choice for all, are we not under a new cultural yoke of a singular feminine model?”
The document also denounced violence inflicted on women: “Selective abortion, infanticide, genital mutilation, crimes of honor, forced marriages, trafficking of women, sexual molestation, rape –which in some parts of the world are inflicted on a massive level and along ethnic lines — are some of the deepest injuries inflicted daily on the soul of the world, on the bodies of women and of girls, who become silent and invisible victims.”

ABOARD THE PAPAL FLIGHT FROM MANILA, Philippines (CNS) – Pope Francis said his September trip to the U.S. will take him to Philadelphia, New York and Washington – where he intends to canonize Blessed Junipero Serra – but he will probably not make other stops.
Pope Francis made his remarks Jan. 19, in an hourlong news conference with reporters accompanying him back to Rome from a weeklong trip to Asia. Four days after announcing he would canonize Blessed Junipero in the U.S. in September, the pope said he wished he could do so in California, the 18th-century Franciscan’s mission field, but would not have time to travel there.
The pope said he planned instead to perform the canonization ceremony at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, saying Washington would be a fitting location because a statue of Blessed Junipero stands in the U.S. Capitol. The pope also confirmed he would visit the United Nations in New York. He had already announced his participation in the late-September World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.
Asked about widespread speculation that he would visit the U.S.-Mexico border on the same trip, Pope Francis said “entering the United States by crossing the border from Mexico would be a beautiful thing, as a sign of brotherhood and of help to the immigrants.” But he said making such a visit would raise expectations that he would visit Mexico’s shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and he joked that “war could break out” if he failed to do so. “There will be time to go to Mexico later on,” he said.

By Cindy Wooden
MANILA, Philippines (CNS) – The realities of life described by young people, especially the tearful question of a 12-year-old girl about why God allows suffering, led Pope Francis to set aside the first text he had prepared for a meeting Jan. 18 with the young people of the Philippines.

Pope Francis is embraced by a child at a home for former street children in Manila, Philippines, Jan. 16. (CNS photo/L’Osservatore Romano via Reuters)

“Certain realities in life can only be seen through eyes cleansed by tears,” the pope said Jan. 19 after listening to Glyzelle Palomar, who used to live on the streets but now has a home thanks to the foundation for street children Pope Francis visited in Manila Jan. 16.
Palomar spoke after Jun Chura – a 14-year-old rescued from the streets by the same foundation – described life on the streets as a struggle to find enough to eat, to fight the temptation of drug use and glue sniffing, and to avoid adults looking for the young to exploit and abuse.
Covering her face with her hand as she wept in front of the microphone, Palomar asked the pope, “Why did God let this happen to us?”
As some 30,000 young people looked on at the University of Santo Tomas, the pope kissed the top of Palomar’s head and pulled her close for a big hug, then embraced her and Chura together.
He also listened to the testimony of two other young men and their questions: How do young people discover God’s will for them? What is love? How can young people become agents of mercy and compassion?
The pope’s gathering with the youths was emotional from the beginning. Opening the encounter, the pope spoke about 27-year-old Kristel Padasas, an employee of the U.S. bishops’ Catholic Relief Services, who died after being struck by a speaker stand knocked down by the wind Jan. 17 after the pope’s Mass in Tacloban.
She was “young, like yourselves,” the pope told the youths, asking them to join him in praying for her and for her parents. “She was the only daughter. Her mother is coming from Hong Kong (and) her father has come to Manila to wait,” he told them.
Pope Francis had received the texts of the young people’s testimonies and questions in advance and had begun rewriting his speech the night before to ensure he responded directly to what they planned to say, said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman. There was not time to have the new text translated, so Pope Francis, who did not read from the text, asked Msgr. Mark Miles from the Vatican Secretariat of State to translate from his Spanish. After more than half an hour, he made a passing attempt to return to the original text, but only to emphasize the challenges the youth face: the challenge of personal integrity, of helping the poor and of protecting the environment.
One of the first things he commented on talking to the youths was the fact that Palomar was the only female on the program.
“Sometimes we’re too ‘machista’ and don’t allow room for the woman,” he said. “But the woman is able to see things with a different eye than men. Women are able to pose questions that we men are not able to understand.”
“Pay attention,” the pope told the young people. Palomar was “the only one who posed a question for which there is no answer. And she wasn’t able to express it in words but tears.”
“When the next pope comes to Manila,” he told them, include “more women” on the program.
Speaking directly to Palomar, he told her, “You have expressed yourself so bravely.”
While it is impossible to explain why God would allow children to suffer, he told the young people, “only when we, too, can cry” can one approach a response.
“I invite each one of you here to ask yourself, ‘Have I learned to weep and cry when I see a child cast aside, when I see someone with a drug problem, when I see someone who has suffered abuse?” the pope told them.
Being moved to tears out of compassion and in the face of the mystery of suffering is holy, he said. It is not the same thing as crying to manipulate or get something from someone.
“Jesus in the Gospel cried, he cried for his dead friend,” Lazarus, “he cried in his heart for the family that had lost its child, he cried in his heart when he saw the old widow having to bury her son, he was moved to tears of compassion when he saw the multitude of crowds without a pastor,” Pope Francis said.
“If you don’t learn how to cry you cannot be good Christians,” he told them.
In the face of suffering like Palomar’s and Chura’s, he said, “our response must either be silence or the word that is born of our tears.”
“Be courageous, do not be afraid to cry,” the pope said.
Responding to the questions of Leandro Santos II, a law student, and Rikki Macolor, a recent graduate who, with his friends, designed a solar-powered night light for typhoon victims, Pope Francis focused on love, compassion and the challenge of not just helping the poor, but allowing oneself to learn from and be evangelized by them.
“What is the most important subject that you have to learn in university, what is the most important subject you learn in life?” the pope asked. “To learn to love. This is the challenge that life offers you.”
“True love is to love and allow yourself to be loved,” he said. “It is harder to let yourself be loved than to love.”
Even when it comes to the life of faith, he said, it seems easier to love God than to really allow oneself to be loved by him. But when one succeeds, he continued, God responds with surprises.
“Don’t be like a computer, thinking that we know everything,” the pope said.
Pope Francis thanked Macolor and his friends for helping the poor victims of Typhoon Yolanda in 2013, but he asked them, “Do you allow yourselves to receive?” Putting his finger to his lips, the pope said he didn’t want them to respond immediately, but to ponder the other, essential Christian part of being with the poor, which is being willing to learn from them and to accept their gifts.
“The Sadducees and doctors of the law in the time of Jesus gave much to the people, they gave them the law and taught them, but they never allowed the people to give them something,” he said.
“Become a beggar,” the pope said. “Learn how to beg,” to receive with humility, “to be evangelized by the poor. The persons we help, the poor, the sick have so much to give us.”
Contributing to this story was Francis X. Rocca in Manila.

By Patricia Zapor
WASHINGTON (CNS) – A not-insignificant part of the diplomatic coup pulled off by the White House and Cuban leaders Dec. 17 was that hardly anyone knew they had been working toward a reset in relations between the two neighbors and longtime antagonists.
That the two nations had been negotiating in secret for 18 months and that the Vatican had played a key role in keeping the discussions moving were among the factors that no doubt made the dramatic shift in policies possible. By keeping negotiations among a small number of diplomats and out of the public eye, outside pressures were kept to a minimum.
In simultaneous news conferences that day, U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington and Cuban President Raul Castro in Havana announced that their countries were re-establishing official diplomatic relations. Obama detailed a lengthy list of things that will become easier – sales of materials to Cuba’s small-business owners, for Internet technology and for housing construction; visits to Cuba by more Americans; banking and use of credit cards by Americans visiting Cuba; remittances of greater amounts of cash – to name some of the major changes.
That’s not to say the 54-year U.S. embargo has gone away altogether. Congress still holds the reins to portions of the laws prohibiting trade with Cuba, intended as a sanction for repression and human rights abuses after the Marxist revolution that put Fidel Castro in power in 1959. He or his brother, Raul, who took over from the ailing Fidel in 2006, have ruled the country ever since.
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower first imposed an embargo on Cuba in October 1960. President John F. Kennedy expanded the embargo, and every president since has maintained it until Obama. He is the first to significantly loosen the controls, in 2009 easing restrictions on travel for family and cultural visits and allowing Americans to send more money to their relatives there.
Critics of the shift in policy, most conspicuously a handful of Cuban-American members of Congress, say they will attempt to block the changes. Among the steps they suggested are opposing the nomination of an ambassador and restricting funds needed to reopen an embassy in Havana.
But Congress also holds the power to retain or end the key parts of the embargo, which were put in place by federal law. The law established the main prohibitions on commerce with Cuba and the ban on travel except as permitted for family, cultural, educational, religious and humanitarian purposes.
The most recent national polling on the embargo done by the Pew Research Center in 2009 found a bare majority, 52 percent, of respondents said the U.S. should renew ties with Cuba. But only 33 percent opposed renewing ties. That poll came not long before the Cuban government began a series of changes, including allowing individuals to buy and sell property and to open businesses. More recently, Cuba began allowing its citizens to travel freely, without government authorization.
Annual polling of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County by Florida International University has found steadily increasing support for ending the embargo, reinstating diplomatic ties and permitting U.S. citizens to freely travel to Cuba. This year, 68 percent favored reinstating diplomatic relations, with younger Cuban-Americans and recent arrivals backing the changes by even greater numbers, as much as 90 percent and 80 percent, respectively.
Tom Quigley, former foreign policy adviser on Latin America and the Caribbean to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Catholic News Service that it’s true what one of the chief critics, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, says about the need for more progress in changing the political systems in Cuba that prompted the call for an embargo in the first place.
“But it’s not going to get any better by leaving the status quo in place,” he added.
The Catholic Church in both countries has long worked to end the embargo. Yet Stephen Colecchi, director of the USCCB’s Office of International Justice and Peace, said he was unaware of the talks between Cuban and U.S. diplomats until the day of the announcement.
Boston daily and Catholic newspapers reported that Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, one of Pope Francis’ key advisers, played a behind-the-scenes role, helping relay messages between a Boston nonprofit group, Beyond Conflict, that encouraged Pope Francis to intervene with Obama to press for an end to the embargo. When Obama and Pope Francis met in March, Cuba was reportedly one of their main topics of conversation.
For years, the Cuban bishops have worked steadfastly to diminish the emotional distance between Cubans and their Cuban-American relatives. Archbishop Dionisio Garcia Ibanez of Santiago de Cuba, president of the Cuban bishops’ conference, used the 2012 observance of the 400th anniversary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, to encourage Cubans worldwide to unite across borders.
He became a regular visitor to the U.S., especially to Cuban emigre communities in Florida and New York.
By the time Pope Benedict visited Havana, Santiago and the shrine of El Cobre in 2012, thousands of Americans went to join him. From Miami alone, nearly 1,000 people went on flights chartered by the archdiocese.
Under Obama’s 2009 orders allowing more “people to people” travel to Cuba, the idea was for interactions between everyday citizens of both countries to help pressure Cuba’s leaders to bring about more improvements.
Archbishop Garcia’s goal was framed in more theological terms, but he was clear about what he hoped would happen if people would come together in a spirit of pilgrimage.
“La Caridad nos une,” (the Virgin of Charity unites us), Archbishop Garcia said repeatedly on visits to the U.S. preceding the anniversary. “Whether inside Cuba or outside Cuba, there is a sense that we are all one church.”
(Copyright © 2014 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)