Church makes dangerous bargain with Castro
BY JOSE AZEL
jazel@miami.edu
The malevolence of the Castro brothers during their five decades regime
is well documented: 3,615 executions by firing squad, 1,253
extrajudicial killings, the imprisonment of thousands of political
prisoners in subhuman conditions, the 1994 tugboat massacre, the
depravation of basic freedoms and the impoverishment of the country's
entire population, countless violations of human rights and much more.
Unquestionably, Fidel Castro's 1962 Armageddon letter to Khrushchev
advocating a Soviet preemptive nuclear attack on the United States is an
expression of unmitigated evil.
Also known is the gentility and heroism of the Ladies in White,
recognized by the European Parliament in 2005 with the Sakharov Prize
for Freedom of Thought. This group of incredibly brave and devout women
attends Mass each Sunday and then silently stands up to the regime by
walking through the streets wearing white clothing to symbolize peace.
Both Fidel Castro and the Ladies in White requested an audience with
Pope Benedict XVI during his Cuba visit. The Ladies in White requested
only a minute of his Holiness' time. In Joseph Ratzinger's seemingly
chauvinistic calculus, the Ladies in White did not merit his time, and
Ratzinger elected to disown his most loyal flock on the island and chose
instead to meet with Mephistopheles.
The church leadership's obsequiousness in accommodating the Cuban
government and its concern with sparing the Castros any political
discomfort responds to a church strategy of gaining space in society for
its ecumenical and humanitarian work. The bargain is a dangerous one as
the church has, in fact, made a deal with the devil.
It may very well discover, as did Faust, the protagonist of the
classical German legend, that it has surrendered its moral integrity
and, that at the end of the term, Mephistopheles will claim his due.
Biology dictates that the end-game for Castroism is not too far in the
future. When Castroism ends, the Cuban economy and society will be in
deep crisis and in total disarray. These objective conditions will
constitute the Cuban collective memory of communism and its leadership,
including the memory of the recent sycophancy and closeness of the
church leadership with the communist leadership.
Behavioral economists speak of the "peak-end rule" which states that we
judge the past almost entirely on the basis of how the experience was at
its peak and at its end. In other words, it is the positive or negative
experience at the end of a process that stays with us rather than some
net average for the entire duration of the event. In the years to come,
when Cubans look into their political rearview mirror they will see the
Communist Party and the Catholic Church as effete institutions,
collaborators to their misery.
At the end of Castroism, prior fondness for Catholicism may be negated
and what will be remembered will be inglorious events such as Cardinal
Jaime Ortega's betrayal of the church's sanctuary tradition by
requesting that the Cuban government evict activists who had taken
refuge in the church, or Pope Benedict's failure to condemn
energetically the human-rights abuses of the Castro regime, and to meet
with the Ladies in White.
In aligning itself with the Cuban government and not with the Cuban
people, the Catholic Church's leadership has miscalculated and entered
into a Faustian bargain exchanging its soul for political favors. I long
for the courage of the Marist brothers of my youth in Cuba's Catholic
schools. They taught us by day and led us daringly in the anticommunist
resistance underground by night. Cuba's Catholic Church will have
limited opportunities in the future to extricate itself from its pact
with the devil. Let us pray it chooses to do so.
José Azel is a senior scholar at the Institute for Cuban and
Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/02/2723711/church-makes-dangerous-bargain.html
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