Cuba sets Good Friday as holiday

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bklynguy
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Vivat Papam!!! :dancing:

I pray that in my lifetime the people of Cuba will be free. :signofcross: Amen
 
It’s great that the communist government of Cuba has shown a little good will. Here’s to hoping that it’s a sign of better things to come.
 
The past few years have seen the Cuban government warm to the involvement of the Catholic Church in cultural, economic and social roles.

This is from an October, 2011 news article:
It’s been a year of resurrection for Cuba’s Roman Catholic Church. Last November, it opened a new seminary — the first since Fidel Castro’s communist revolution all but shut down the church 50 years ago. In May, Cuba’s bishops finished brokering the release of 115 political prisoners. Though education is strictly the role of the regime, Catholic dioceses have been able to expand their training of teachers, civic leaders and entrepreneurs — they even offer that iconic capitalist degree, the M.B.A. A statue of Cuba’s Catholic patroness, La Virgen de la Caridad (Our Lady of Charity), is being hailed by large, devoted crowds as it tours the island before her 400th anniversary next year. “It demonstrates a spiritual desire in Cubans,” Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Cuba’s top prelate, told me. It is, he adds, “a return to God.”
Click to expand...
.
The church is discovering that being the first — and only — alternative institution to the Cuban revolution is both a blessing and a curse. As President Raúl Castro, who took over for his ailing older brother Fidel in 2008, tries to engineer politically perilous economic reforms in his severely cash-strapped nation, he seems to have decided the church is the only noncommunist entity he can trust to aid those transitions without seriously challenging his rule. Speaking to the National Assembly in August, Raúl even offered a mea culpa for decades of blacklisting “Cubans with religious beliefs.” Says Ortega: “We’re breathing an atmosphere of change, feeling a moment when there are no more confrontations” between church and state.
Click to expand...
time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2095599,00.html

And from a November, 2010 article:
Cuban President Raul Castro joined an American archbishop and other Roman Catholic leaders Wednesday to open a national seminary on the outskirts Havana, the first religious construction on the communist-run island in more than a half century.
Click to expand...
Castro’s presence at the function - and the fact that the seminary was built at all - sent a powerful message of just how much relations between the church and Cuba’s government have improved in recent years.
Click to expand...
utsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/03/raul-castro-catholic-leaders-open-cuban-seminary/
 
Yay. 🙂
Praying for Cuba and the intentions of Our Holy Father.
 
Dale_M said:
Castro’s presence at the function - and the fact that the seminary was built at all - sent a powerful message of just how much relations between the church and Cuba’s government have improved in recent years.
Click to expand...
Wow. Castro’s presence really does send a powerful message. At best I would have expected him to give the go-ahead, but not to attend personally. One can only hope that, for as long as Cuba remains communist, the government will continue to show this degree of respect and progressively reduce the restrictions on the right to practise the Catholic faith.
 
I remember my old Protestant pastor saying he thougth Fidel Castro would become Christian ie. Catholic. “He’ll leave it pretty late” he said. Of course it remains to be seen if this happens, but if so he’ll be right once again.

Other predictions of his that have so far happened (he died in 1992 himself) -
  1. My sister wouldn’t live long. She got leukemia and died in 2005 aged 45.
  2. His own eldest son would have a severe health breakdown. He had a stroke circa 1997 or 98.
  3. There’d be a second Gulf War. “I think the Americans will have had enough of him (Saddam), and they’ll get rid of him. But I think they’ll lose a few men next time.” The way he said “few” meant it would be more than a few. That happened as we all know in 2003, and Saddam Hussein was hanged on Dec. 30 2006. But the Americans lost a “few men” - around 4400 or so, with another 33,000 or more wounded.
  4. There’d be a firearm massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania. In 1996 there was Australia’s worst firearms massacre at Port Arthur.
  5. I’d be doing a cleaning job for a short time, wouldn’t like it much, but the Lord would just want me to “hear about a ghost.” In 2006 I did a cleaning job for a short time, didn’t like it much, and “heard about a ghost”. In fact, it required my reading of a priest at Ipswich on this very forum to finish the prophecy off, by ensuring a mass was said by email exchange with this particular priest (and the odds of finding an Australian priest on this forum who was also domiciled about 500 or so metres of the store where the “ghost” - suicide - was located was very thin).
  6. I’d make a silly mistake and “they’ll use that to get rid of you” in my job. In 1995, I “made a silly mistake” and they “used that to get rid of me”.
  7. I’d become a Catholic. "I think you might be happier there… (with some other comments). I became Catholic circa 1996 / 97.
  8. He warned a young bloke in his congregation if he didn’t start riding his motor bike more carefully, “You won’t last two weeks!” He told me he felt guilty about this as he buried him precisely two weeks later.
And now possibly Castro. As I’ve commented I’ll be interested to see if Fidel Castro makes a public confession of faith. I won’t be surprised if he does. I wasn’t surprised when my sister got leukemia either. I wasn’t happy about it, but I almost expecting it as I knew just how accurate the old pastor was.

So let’s see what happens here. If he does, he’ll have left it “very late in the day” as the old pastor predicted. He may not live much longer beyond the confession of faith, if the old pastor was correct.

Anyway time will tell.
 
Will this be a permanent holiday or a temporary one that is only for this year? That said, I also applaud Cuba for doing this.
 
God bless Cuba and help her find her way back home to the Church :gopray:
 
The church is discovering that being the first — and only — alternative institution to the Cuban revolution is both a blessing and a curse. As President Raúl Castro, who took over for his ailing older brother Fidel in 2008, tries to engineer politically perilous economic reforms in his severely cash-strapped nation, he seems to have decided the church is the only noncommunist entity he can trust to aid those transitions without seriously challenging his rule.
Click to expand...
Interesting. And it’s true, the Church does always want to help those in need (especially the poor), and in this day and age the hierarchy has no interest in being the secular authority (that’s not to say that it won’t lobby for certain things, such as a Good Friday holiday).
 
King_Lazy said:
That’s quite an amazing pastor you had there.
Click to expand...
He certainly was. I’ve said a number of times that my father turned up in my room the night he died in January 1979. One of the predictions he made was “You’ll meet a pastor. You’ll think he’s great, but all he’ll do is discourage you even more!”

I was an atheist then by the way.

The pastor he was referring to was obviously the pastor I mentioned above, and sometime around 1991, the pastor said, “I owe you an apology. You needed encouragement and all I’ve done is to discourage you even more!” I’d told him a number of times about my father turning up, but when I pointed out to him he’d just repeated my apparitional father back to me almost word for word, he was shaken.

However I learnt a great deal from the old pastor, and he was a good, holy, wise and prophetic man. As I said, I found after a while that if he thought something was going to happen, it nearly always did.

So I’ll be curious to see what happens in relation to Fidel Castro and the Church, since that was one of his predictions.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top