The Church, dialogue, and the critics
A Correspondent’s Notebook
The Church, dialogue, and the critics
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
ramymanuel@yahoo.com
I think Progreso Semanal has done well to publish the article written by Emilio Ichikawa and the reply to it written by Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera. The topic of the Catholic Church’s mediation in Cuba to find a solution to the political prisoners behind bars – like the solution to the Ladies in White impasse – deserves it.
As I see it, the prisoners and their release are at the core of the issue. But Mr. Ichikawa, I think, goes overboard when he goes beyond the prisoners to a purported “schism” in the Cuban Catholic Church that “has been talked about,” and even local “wars” that apparently broke out in Pinar del Río and, a little more discreetly, in Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey.
In addition, Ichikawa insists on the “Havana-ization” of the Catholic Church, a kind of capital-city despotism over the rest of the island. And the prisoners? What do they have to do with this geographic-political kidnapping?
The more I read, and look under letters and words, I find in Ichikawa’s article an indirect way to undermine the efforts of the would-be liberators, at the expense of projecting an image of fracture in the institution that has dialogued with the Cuban government. That dialogue was conducted by Cardinal Ortega, Archbishop of Havana, and Msgr. Dionisio García, Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba and president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba (COCC), which is the highest authority and the Church’s guiding organization in the country.
I understand that all core questions in the Church are defined by the COCC, with the participation of all of the nation’s bishops, and that the outcome is called the pastoral of the Cuban Church. (The pastoral is something like a program of action for a certain time period, and it contains the topic of the prisons and the inmates.)
Let’s look at what some people – I don’t know who – have called the “schism” mentioned by Ichikawa. As to the behavior of the Catholic Church in Cuba, there is a diversity of opinions and shades in the bosom of the Church, and not only among the lay people. But, is a diversity of opinions bad? Doesn’t that diversity have basic limits that have not been affected? Aren’t both priests and lay people under the jurisdiction of their appropriate bishops?
I am sure that, in Catholic communities and the world of priests, opinions exist as to what the Church must do in this dialogue but not in its promotion and active presence. For the Church to become an opponent would mean putting aside the concept of mediation, which, before God and men, the Catholic Church assumes as a right and an attribute. The different opinions might rather refer to due prudence and tact in the conduct of the dialogues.
Doesn’t Ichikawa think that the same thing could be happening in the structures of government and political militancy? Dialogues conducted in delicate and difficult circumstances provide fodder for all types of opinions.
The examples of “fractures” in the bosom of the Church, as given by Ichikawa, lack sufficient weight to be catalogued as schismatic. After looking into the situations that Ichikawa calls “fractures,” I’ve come to the conclusion that there were attitudes among some lay people – upon whom I shall not render a judgment – that went outside the pastoral line to such a degree that they might seriously compromise the institution, because, apparently, they were invading spaces that are clearly political.
The Catholic Church is reluctant to relive the traumatic experience it had during the first years of the revolutionary process, when, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, it served as an umbrella and/or starting point to activities that were contrary to the established power. That period compromised the relations between the institution and the state, leaving scars that still remain.
It seems to me that disqualifying the mediation of the Catholic Church is the equivalent of trying to halt a very necessary dialogue experience. Why?
1. I begin with the people who suffer the most: the inmates and their families. They would be the first to benefit if the present conversations are successful.
2. A “schism” would hinder an incipient dialogue between the state and an institution of civilian society that does not function vertically and has exercised criticism with serenity. If we go outside the concrete humanitarian topic (the possible release of the inmates) and look at our national moment, we should also encourage it and make sure that this practice – which seeks consensus in civilian society – is not limited to certain circumstances and brief dialogues but extends to all eventualities, as a new form of the relationship between the revolutionary state and the whole of society.
Limited though the government’s economic measures may be, they will be reflected in the dynamics of the whole of Cuban society and will gradually establish novel forms of relationship and articulation. Might the delays (which we resent) be associated with a balance of benefits and setbacks? I think (with extreme care) that the so-called process of “actualization” – a word chosen and surely selected by consensus in the political spheres, because of what the concept implies – launched by President Raúl Castro Ruz portends a different form of relationships of every type. How much depth does that actualization have? I have no answer.
3. If the process is fruitful and culminates in the gradual release of the prisoners, the winners would be the prisoners, the path of serene and constructive dialogue, the Cuban Catholic Church, the revolutionary state and, to a great degree, the whole of society. The loser is the aimless confrontation anxious to dissolve society and provoke a point of no return. If confrontation wins, I foresee that there will be no country for anyone. Maybe that’s the desire of frustrated and hateful people.
