Persecution grows despite elevated awareness
By Diana Chandler, posted April 25, 2018 in The Persecuted Church

Metadata: Topic(s): The Persecuted Church

Format(s): Text Articles
WASHINGTON (BP) — While egregious acts of religious persecution are more likely to cause global protest 20 years after the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, many countries are increasingly denying such freedoms, a federal watchdog commission reported today (April 25).
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) noted the dichotomy in releasing its 2018 Annual Report on 2017 religious freedom violations in 28 countries.
“Sadly, religious freedom conditions deteriorated in many countries in 2017, often due to increasing authoritarianism or under the guise of countering terrorism,” USCIRF Chairman Daniel Mark said in releasing the report.
“Yet there is also reason for optimism 20 years after the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act,” Mark said. “The importance of this foundational right is appreciated more now than ever, and egregious violations are less likely to go unnoticed.”

“In its second year, the Trump Administration should build on stated commitments to elevate religious freedom as a priority in our foreign policy and national security strategy by vigorously implementing IRFA, the Frank Wolf Act, and the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act [of 2016] to pressure egregious violators,” Mark said. “USCIRF also urges the administration to prioritize seeking the release of religious prisoners of conscience abroad, and to work closely with international partners in efforts to promote freedom of religion or belief for all.”October will mark the 20th anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) which has never been fully implemented, USCIRF said, but was strengthened in 2016 by the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act (Frank Wolf Act) to address implementation concerns. USCIRF’s report encouraged the Trump administration to fully implement IRFA and related laws to speed and protect international religious freedom.
USCIRF annually recommends countries of particular concern (CPCs), or Tier 1 countries, based on “systemic, ongoing, egregious” violations, as well as a Tier 2 “watch list” of countries that meet one or two of the criteria for CPCs. Since the Frank Wolf Act, Congress also has recommended entities of particular concern, EPCs, for non-state violators such as terrorist groups.
Genocide, killings, slavery, rape, imprisonment, forced displacement and forced conversions were among the most severe abuses reported in addition to childhood religious education bans, female marginalization, intimidation, harassment and property destruction.
“In addition to endangering individuals and communities, severe violations of religious freedom threaten the stability and security of nations and regions,” USCIRF said. “The freedom to follow one’s conscience in matters of religion or belief is essential to human dignity and human flourishing.”
The list of CPCs recommendations in 2018 are the Central African Republic (CAR), Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Syria and Vietnam, in addition to 10 countries the U.S. Congress so designated in December 2017: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
USCIRF recommends 12 countries for a U.S. 2018 watch list: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia and Turkey.
The Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Shabaab in Somalia are listed as EPCs.

The full report is accessible at uscirf.gov/reports-briefs/annual-report/2018-annual-report.Acts of persecution noted in the USCIRF report include the unjust imprisonment of American pastor Andrew Brunson in Turkey; a genocidal campaign waged by ISIS against Christians, Yazidis and Shi’a Muslims in Iraq and Syria; in Nigeria, the government’s failure to prevent or punish religion-based violence involving Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen; in Pakistan, blasphemy laws and increased extremist activity against minority religious communities including Christians and others; and in Russia, banning Jehovah’s Witnesses and accusing peaceful religious groups of extremism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DIANA CHANDLER

Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.Read All by Diana C

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Christian Persecution in Cuba

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Overview:

Last year marked the first time in 59 years that a Castro was not leading Cuba. Despite the change in leadership, churches in Cuba face unrelenting pressure from the government, which remains committed to communism’s atheistic beliefs and sees them as a threat to the revolution. When church leaders resist state teachings that are contrary to God’s Word and disobey government restrictions on Christian witness, they are called in for interrogation. Since gathering in unregistered churches and constructing new church buildings continue to be banned, many churches continue to illegally build places of worship. In the past few years, the waning “spirit of the revolution” has been revived. Many have again become committed to the nationalistic, communist ideology championed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the 1950s. Cubans remain poor, with the government seeking to control every aspect of life.

Major Religions:

Most Cubans are atheists. A significant number of Cubans engage in superstitious and spiritist practices, including the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería.

Persecutor:

The government persecutes Christians.

What It Means To Follow Christ In Cuba:

Concern for its global reputation has caused the Cuban government to change tactics in regard to persecution. Christian leaders are often called into meetings with government officials or imprisoned for up to 48 hours to pressure them. Churches are demolished by hired gangs so the government can deny responsibility. Church buildings are seized, and no new church buildings have been legally built in the country since the revolution. Many believers meet in unsanctioned “house churches,” often extensions of the pastor’s home or shaded structures in the backyard. The church continues to grow through active evangelism, but some of the country’s estimated 1 million believers have never owned a Bible. Though no Christians are known to be imprisoned in Cuba, many are so closely watched by the government that they are effectively under house arrest. In addition, Christians are often denied jobs and educational opportunities.

Access To Bibles:

Though great strides have been made in Bible distribution in recent years, access remains restricted. Two years ago, Cuba allowed the legal purchase and sale of Bibles only to members of the ecumenical Protestant church organization, but most Christian literature remains illegal. There are no Christian bookstores on the island. Bibles can cost up to a third of a worker’s monthly income. Give Bibles

VOM Work:

VOM distributes Bibles and supports discipleship and evangelism. Give to VOM’s Global Ministry

Christians denounce the upsurge of religious persecution in Cuba

“The sustained growth of the churches unnerves the government”, Cuban Pastor Mario Félix Lleonart, says. Several evangelical leaders have been interrogated and arrested in the last months.

Javier Bolaños , Evangelical Focus
Protestante Digital · HAVANA ·
A street of Havana. / Alexander Kunze (Unsplash, CC0)
Leonardo Rodríguez Alonso, a religious freedom activist in Cuba, was arbitrarily detained on February 28, and released days later.
He is one of the regional coordinators for the Patmos Institute, an independent civil society organisation that promotes inter-religious dialogue and freedom of religion and belief for all.
The detention was confirmed to Spanish news website Protestante Digital by Pastor Mario Félix Lleonart, general coordinator of the organisation, who is in exile.
Rodriguez was arrested on his way home to Villa Clara from the town of Caibarién, where he was leading meetings with Human Rights defenders, informs advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).
He had already been detained by the National Revolutionary Police Unit of the city of Santa Clara last November, and on several other occasions.
PERSECUTION AND HARASSMENT

“The arrests of brother Leonardo and other forms of harassment have multiplied over the past year and so far, because the Patmos Institute submitted a report about religious freedom in the island in the last four years to the UN Human Rights Council for the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Cuba, which will take place next May in Geneva”, Mario Félix Lleonart told Protestante Digital.
The report “was received and accepted”, and the authorities arrested Leonardo “to express their annoyance with our Patmos Institute, and to warn him that they will not allow him to travel to Geneva”.
“THE GROWTH OF THE CHURCHES UNNERVES THE GOVERNMENT”
According to Lleonart, “the sustained growth of the churches in recent years unnerves a political system that needs a civil society as weak as possible to govern at will”.
As reported by Protestante Digital in mid-February, the main national leaders of the “Power to Transform” evangelistic campaign, which was held in Havana one year ago, were interrogated by the Revolutionary Police, also known as Cuba's political police.
Then, the authorities were interested in the fact that the Cuban evangelical churches had worked together in the organization of the event. For the Cuban government, each denomination must have its activities separately.
Cuba has beengoverned by the communist party sinceFidel Castro took power in 1959. He died in November 2016.
“GROWING NUMBER OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM VIOLATIONS”
Although the Communist regime have shown some signs of economic and political reforms, repression has continued under Raúl Castro.
According to the organisation Open Doors, Cuban Christians face constant surveillance and infiltration by the government. From January to December 2017, a CSW report recorded 325 separate violations of freedom of religion or belief in the country.
“CSW is deeply concerned by the growing number and severity of religious freedom violations reported by a wide variety of denominations and religious groups, which seem to show that the government is attempting to tighten its control over the activities and membership of religious groups”, says the report.
However, “it appears, that the government is now also diversifying its tactics by threatening activists and religious leaders with trumped up criminal charges, arbitrarily preventing them from traveling out of the country and targeting their children”, CSW adds.
“GOD HAS OTHER PLANS FOR CUBA”
“The Communist Party of Cuba and its Office of Religious Affairs, especially the Central Committee, are the main responsible for the violations of religious freedoms that take place in Cuba”, Lleonart told Protestante Digital.
The pastor believes that “the coming departure of president Raúl Castro is just a very well planned move to confuse the international community and seek some legitimacy that is badly damaged”.
“Persecuting religious liberties has been something innate to them during their six decades in power. But I have no doubt that God has other plans for Cuba. Despite the plans of men, times of refreshment are coming”, he concluded.
Published in: Evangelical Focus - world - Christians denounce the upsurge of religious persecution in Cuba

Cuban religious leaders are against

the humanitarian aid that
```
was organized from exile 
```

Ismael Laborde y Juan Alexis Hernández García,líderes religiosos Foto © Facebook

Lutheran leaders in Cuba were against the humanitarian aid

that was made from

 the United States and that according to Rosa María Payá,

 from Cuba Decide,

 is already on the island thanks to the work of

various religious institutions.

 From the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba,

 Bishop Ismael Laborde,

of the United Evangelical Church, said that it is

"ethically unacceptable"

 to pretend to offer aid to "the poor."

"Humanitarian actions must be based on love and

respect for the dignity

of the peoples and be consistent with the priorities

of the Cuban government,"

the religious leader sympathetic to the Havana regime said

on Facebook.

His comment took place shortly after the

Council of Churches of Cuba spoke out

against humanitarian aid, which would benefit

some 15,000 families,

according to data provided by the Foundation for

Pan American Democracy,

which promoted the collection of supplies.

 "Everything must be done decently and with order

 from the faith or institute of good

will. Not with political trickery. It is unfair and ethically

rude to use deficiencies

for politicking purposes. That offends common intelligence

and God himself,"

said the Lutheran leader .

The Christian bishop also mentioned that thanks

to the Humanitarian Aid Project

to face COVID19, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church

in America,

some 300 families from Santiago (believers and non-believers)

received money

to purchase the food modules sold by the State, as well as pork,

chicken and medicines.

 For his part, the auxiliary bishop of the

Church of the Lutheran Confession in Cuba,

Juan Alexis Hernández García, published an extensive message

on Facebook in which he resorted to rhetoric and

the official discourse to point out that some

"are determined to continue and even deepen retrograde

and imperial plans "and make use of" politicking "

to achieve such ends.

"When I speak of politicking, I mean to side with a cruel,

inhuman and ruthless system, it is to side with the few and go

 against the many.

It is to see how the Bible and the Name of God are used,

to plunge an entire people

into destabilization, confrontation and oblivion.

This is how it was done with Bolivia

 and that is how it will be done with us,

"wrote Hernández García.

 In a boast of his speech related to the Cuban regime,

 the Christian questioned

the aid that comes from the "most radical wing

of the Cuban exile in the

 United States" and made his words coincide with the message

 of the

 Council of Churches of Cuba, which was also shown

against that humanitarian aid.

"How are they going to offer help now, when they

 have ignored and supported

 a blockade for 60 years with the intention of exterminating

an entire

 people whose only fault has been to think politically differently,

that is called genocide!"

 This Friday, through an official statement,

the pro-government CIC described

this aid as "an offense to the people and the churches,

" according to statements

by its president, the Reverend Antonio Santana Hernández.

For Santana Hernández, the "interest is

political and economic" in this "

supposed aid" is evident, which he disassociated

with the trajectory

 of "brotherhood and solidarity of the Cuban and American

churches."

This week, Rosa María Payá, leader of the Cuba Decide platform,

 announced the arrival of this humanitarian aid on the island.

“During the last weeks, the
churches that have been in charge of sending and receiving

humanitarian aid
have confirmed to us that the containers are in the port.

. These churches have been notified by the shipping company

and have complied with all the established requirements

and have also

completed all the regular processes, ”he explained.

The initiative was announced in May and Cubans

living in Miami collaborated

with the project, which would benefit some 15 families

throughout the country,

 fundamentally affected by the economic crisis that aggravated

the coronavirus pandemic.

 Reported https://www.cibercuba.com

Cuban pastor arrested and church demolished

30 Oct 2020
Early on Friday morning, 30 October, Cuban authorities in the city of Santiago de Cuba moved to demolish a church that has been under threat since 2015.
Early on Friday morning, 30 October, Cuban authorities in the city of Santiago de Cuba moved to demolish a church that has been under threat since 2015. A prominent pastor of another church who was recording the demolition was detained by Cuban police and remains in custody.
Cuban State Security, accompanied by heavy machinery including bulldozers, arrived at the site at about 7:30am and began to attempt to clear the area located in the Abel Santamaria neighborhood of Santiago de Cuba. Witnesses told CSW that the authorities planned to demolish the Assemblies of God Church as well as the homes of members of the church located on the property. The Assemblies of God is one of the largest religious groups in Cuba and is legally recognized by the government.
Pastor Alain Toledano, a prominent leader of an unregistered denomination, the Apostolic Movement, and who lives in the same neighborhood, went to the site to record the government attack on the church. He broadcast it on Facebook Live via his mobile phone. As he was filming, he was approached and physically apprehended by men in plainclothes. The phone was dropped on the ground and before the feed was cut, the sound of bulldozers can be heard as members of the church sing in the background.
Pastor Toledano was taken by Cuban police to the Motorizada Police Station and has been held incommunicado since about 8am morning.
Cuban authorities claim that the church, which is under the leadership of Reverend Fausto Polemo, was to be demolished to make way for train tracks. CSW sources question this, noting that the church is the only building in the neighborhood that was destroyed. The church has long been a target of the government. Officials at the Cuban Physical Planning and Housing Departments first attempted to demolish the church in 2015 but backed off after members of the church and other denominations, led by Reverend Polemo, held a peaceful sit-in in the building. They also threatened to confiscate the homes of those living on the property in 2015.
Pastor Toledano has also been a regular target of the government since beginning of his ministry in 2003. Over the past 15 years his church has been demolished twice. In 2019 he was put on the list of ‘regulados’, Cubans who are prohibited from traveling internationally, was summoned by the police dozens of times, and was warned a criminal case had been opened against him.
CSW CEO, Scot Bower, said “CSW is deeply concerned at the events of this morning. We strongly condemn the demolition of the Assemblies of God Church and the eviction of church members. This church has been in the crosshairs of the Cuban government since 2015 and its arbitrary destruction is a serious violation of freedom of religion or belief. Pastor Alain Toledano’s actions this morning demonstrated cross-denominational solidarity and we commend his courage in bearing witness to government attacks on Reverend Fausto Polemo and the members of his church. We call on the Cuban authorities to immediately release Pastor Toledano and to cease its targeting of him and his family.”

Tags cuba,alain toledano,reverend fausto polemo,arrested

Pastor Alain Toledano is arrested

in the middle of the demolition of his church

The evangelical pastor was arrested while filming the destruction of his Church in Santiago de Cuba.

Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn,WhatsApp

DDC TV

Santiago de Cuba 30 Oct 2020 - 20:05 CET

Cuba: church demolished and hundreds arrested

9 Feb 2016

Emanuel Church, a large church in eastern Cuba affiliated to the Apostolic Movement, an unregistered Protestant denomination, was demolished by the authorities on 5 February while hundreds of church members were detained.

The property of Reverend Alain Toledano in Santiago de Cuba was surrounded by officials including members of the police, state security and the military at approximately 5am on 5 February. They detained his wife, Marilín Alayo Correa, before demolishing both Emanuel Church and the pastoral home.

The destruction of the church follows similar demolitions of two Apostolic Movement churches in Camaguey and Las Tunas provinces on 8 January.

Over the course of 5 February approximately 200 leaders and members of Emanuel Church were also detained. A group of around 40 were held in a local school while others were taken to police stations across the region to stop them from protesting the demolition. Church leaders reported that many were beaten while they were being detained. The government has repeatedly refused to register the Apostolic Movement denomination.

Reverend Toledano was in the United States attending a religious event at the time of the government action against the church. He told Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) that he believes the Cuban government intentionally carried out the eviction and demolition when he was out of the country. He expressed concern at the impact on his daughters, ages 11 and 12, who he said were screaming as they witnessed their mother being detained, adding that this is the second time they have experienced the destruction of their home and church. In 2007, the Cuban government carried out a significant operation to destroy the church, also located in the Abel Santamaria neighborhood of Santiago, which at the time had around 700 members.

Church leaders told CSW that the church and family home were totally destroyed. In addition, the government confiscated goods belonging to the church including pews, chairs, audio equipment a piano and other musical instruments. Over 1,000 blocks of cement were also confiscated, despite the fact that the Toledano family has documents showing that they were legally purchased.

The property is privately owned by Reverend Toledano and the government had approved the construction of and renovation work on the buildings. However, Reverend Toledano notified CSW of numerous threats of church eviction and closure that he received throughout 2015. These included threats by three men claiming to be government officials on 13 October 2015. In response to the threats, the church organised a ‘sleep in’ on 13 November 2015 with members staying on the property 24 hours a day. However, these efforts were met with an eviction order issued by government Planning and Housing officials two weeks later.

CSW’s Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said, “We are extremely disturbed to learn of this latest church demolition by the Cuban authorities, in a similar manner to the destruction of the two Apostolic Movement churches on 8 January. We are also extremely concerned for the family of Reverend Toledano and his wife Marilín, who saw their home razed as part of this destruction. This series of demolitions since the New Year indicates a worrying escalation in terms of violations of freedom of religion or belief in Cuba. Again, we urge the international community to raise the demolition of these three churches, the mass detentions of pastors and church members, as well as the threats against others with the Cuban government as a matter of urgency. We continue to call on the EU and the US to make freedom of religion or belief a central component of its dialogues with Cuba and to insist on improvement in this area.”

https://www.csw.org.uk

Church destroyed and 200 hundred members detained in Cuba

Florence Taylor 09 February 2016 | 2:13 PM

Cuban authorities demolished a large church on 5 February while hundreds of church members were detained, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).

Rev Alain Toledano preaching at the Emanuel ChurchCSW

Emanuel Church in eastern Cuba, affiliated to the Apostolic Movement – an unregistered Protestant denomination – was surrounded by officials including police, state security and the military at 5am last Friday.

They detained Rev Alain Toledano's wife before demolishing both the church and the pastor's home. Property found inside the church including pews, chairs and a piano were confiscated. Toledano was in the United States at the time of the incident.

Approximately 200 leaders and members of the church were also detained. Around forty were held in a local school and the rest were taken to police stations, apparently to ensure there were no protests against the demolition.

Despite the existance of legal documents proving rightful ownership, over 1,000 blocks of cement were also confiscated by the government, according to CSW.

The church building and home were privately owned by Toledano and extension work had previously been approved by the government.

Emanuel church members meet to pray following the demolitionCSW

Toledano told CSW that he believes the timing of the demolition coinciding with his trip to the US was not a coincidence, but tactical.

He said he had received numerous threats of church eviction and closure throughout 2015.

This is the second time the family has experienced the destruction of both church and home, and Toledano expressed concern about the impact these events would have on his daughters – aged 11 and 12 – who he said were screaming as they witnessed their mother being detained.

"This series of demolitions since the New Year indicates a worrying escalation in terms of violations of freedom of religion or belief in Cuba," said Mervyn Thomas, CSW's chief executive.

The Cuban government has repeatedly refused to register Apostolic Movement churches and Friday's destruction comes in the wake of similar demolitions in Camaguey and Las Tunas provinces on 8 January.

Cuba’s socialist regime demolishes church and homes of several of its members

October 30, 2020 by Carlos Eire

From our Bureau of Socialist Social Justice and Tolerance for Religion

Once again, Castro, Inc.’s monopolistic reflexes have kicked in. Castro, Inc. must control everything, including all churches or houses of worship.

So, a house of worship that had the nerve to exclude itself from this “benevolent” monopoly has been smashed to smithereens, and so have the homes of several of its members, who insisted on being uncooperative.

Needless to say, the pastor, the man reporting this abuse, and several others have been arrested.

Socialist social justice in action. Ever vigilant for the rights of the oligarchs and their monopoly on everything, including worship.

Loosely translated from CiberCuba:

The Cuban evangelical pastor, Alain Toledano Valiente, a member of the Sendas de Justicia Network, has denounced through a direct on Facebook the demolition of a place of worship of the Las Asambleas de Dios church, in Santiago de Cuba, and of several houses .
“They are also demolishing many houses. They have already demolished several houses and now they are demolishing the warehouse where the Christians gather ”, explained the pastor.
Toledano Valiente showed the great movement of trucks, bulldozers, tractors and patrol cars, in addition to an overwhelming presence of State Security agents, many of them dressed in civilian clothes.
The pastor, who has suffered repression on numerous occasions by the island’s government, explained that they went upstairs when he was filming inside the place of worship and that they removed him from the place.
“They are calling the repressors to take charge of me,” he said at another time; “Pending because they are going to try to take my phone away.”
“They fear information more than weapons!” He said.
“Share this video, this is not a video of any program, it is a video of the attack by the Cuban state against the church, it is an attack by State Security against the people of God,” he said, while in the background several songs of faithful of the evangelical church, gathered in the place. (Video plea HERE watch first two minutes, then skip to the 20 minute mark to watch church being dismantled)
“Let the world find out what is happening here, the true face of this political system, the true face of the communist system.”
From minute 8 of the video, the screen goes black after a struggle in which the pastor is heard demanding that his phone not be taken from him or mistreated.
continue reading HERE in Spanish includes Video

https://babalublog.com

Cuban Pastor Threatened with Imprisonment

written by Michael Ireland August 12, 2019

HAVANA, CUBA (ANS) – A Cuban pastor has been told he risks imprisonment if his church goes ahead with a planned women’s conference.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) says Alain Toledano Valiente, a leader in the Apostolic Movement, was summoned to appear at the La Motorizada Unit #3 Police Station on August 7, where he was told by the police station commander that if his church went ahead with a planned women’s event on August 8, he would be charged with the crime of disobedience and would risk imprisonment.

Note: Please help Assist News Service to be a voice for Christians around the world.Donate to ANS today

Pastor Alain Toledano Valiente

Toledano Valiente told CSW that he received the summons on the evening of August 7 and was told to present himself to the police at 10am on August 8. No reason was given for the summons. Upon arriving at La Motorizada Unit #3 Police Station, he was interrogated for almost three hours by the unit commander.

CSW said despite the threats against him, Toledano Valiente indicated that the church would go ahead with the ‘Deborah Conference’ which aims to empower women.

In July, Toledano Valiente was stopped by government agents and blocked from boarding a flight to the US to attend the Ministerial on International Religious Freedom. He is still officially banned from leaving Cuba and his right to move freely within the country is also restricted.

“It looks like the regime is planning to invent criminal charges to bring against me in order to imprison me, just as they have done in the past with other pastors,” Toledano Valiente told CSW.

“I have had to deal with the fury and the hatred of the communist regime in many different ways and I think now I have to deal with dirty tricks on their part. I continue to be prohibited from travelling and I don’t think they are interested in freeing me. This is the price I have to pay in this country.

“I have had to cancel many national and international events because of this restriction. They want to suffocate me, trying to pin me down into a tight space to eliminate both my voice and myself, a pressure that wants to destroy both the church and me.”

CSW Head of Advocacy Anna-Lee Stangl said: “Concerns that weakened protections for freedom of religion or belief in the new constitution indicated a harder line from the new government appear to be validated. There is no justification for stripping religious leaders, who have committed no crime, of their right to travel or to arbitrarily ban churches from holding special religious events.

“We call on the Cuban government to immediately cease its harassment Alain Toledano Valiente and other church leaders and to allow these peaceful religious events and initiatives to take place without interference from the state.”

The author of this story, Michael Ireland, is a self-supported media missionary with ANS. Click here to support him as a missionary journalist.

Michael Ireland

Michael Ireland is an Internet journalist and Media Missionary serving as Chief Correspondent for the ASSIST News Service. He is also an ordained minister and an award-winning local cable-TV host/producer. Michael has served with Dan Wooding and ASSIST News Service (ANS) since its beginning in 1989. He has reported for ANS from Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, Jordan, China, and Russia. Follow Michael on Facebook at MichaelIrelandMediaMissionary and on Twitter at @Michael_ASSIST. You may support Michael as a media missionary at https://actintl.givingfuel.com/ireland-michael

'If a ruler is not willing to resign

for the good of his people,

he is a tyrant,' says a Cuban priest

"The Church does have to get involved in politics," he says.

"The common good matters to all of us."

DDC

La Habana 19 Oct 2020 - 17:48 CEST

Jorge Luis Pérez Soto offers his words to Juan Carlos Varela,

President of the Republic of Panama, during his visit to the

Archdiocese of Havana in 2018. New Word

Father Jorge Luis Pérez Soto, from the San Francisco de Paula Parish,

 in Diez de Octubre, made clear criticisms of the Cuban regime in a homily

in which he defended the people and the "political" position that

the Catholic Church should have in societies. .

"Political authority is not above the people, it is due to the people who put it

there (...) When a ruler is not willing to resign, get out of the way

for the common good, for the good of his people, for the good

of His society is a tyrant, because no ruler is above his people,

"Pérez Soto said in a homily this Sunday.

Citing the words of the Spanish Dominican academic

and friar Francisco de Vitoria, he pointed out: "If a ruler governs badly,

he will be responsible for the evil he causes to his people,

but the people who keep him in power will be co-responsible."

The parish priest insisted that "political authority exists to serve the people."

"(...) If it corresponds to Caesar obedience, if it corresponds to Caesar to serve

him, to accompany him, because he is a good Caesar, that is what must be given.

 César is responsible for telling him 'you are a tyrant', that's what you have to do.

To Caesar what belongs to Caesar, "he said in his homily.

During his homily, he recalled phrases that the Government has used

 in the past to support its propaganda campaigns and

the submission of the people to its authorities.

"'Pa' whatever ', do you remember that slogan? That can only be said to God,"

said Pérez Soto.

Near the end of his 20-minute sermon, the priest rejected that the

Church should stay away from politics.

"Sometimes people say, 'the church doesn't have to get involved in politics.

' Sorry, the church does have to get involved in politics.

What politics does it have to get involved in? First, politics is

the good of governing the society seeking the common good.

The common good matters to all of us. Who does not care for the good of Cuba

 today (…) We all care because that is what life is about,

the only one

we have in this world, "he reflected.

In the father's opinion, "there is no right to ask anyone

 to sacrifice his life in this world for a tomorrow

that will never come."

"The Catholic cannot be apolitical. That is a lying word that

the only thing he talks about is cowardice," he settled.

The highest representatives of the Catholic Church

 in Cuba have been questioned for their

lack of criticism of the Government

and the silence around the repression against

dissenting voices.

https://diariodecuba.com

By Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post Reporter Follow

People walk near the Church of Our Virgin of Charity in Havana, Cuba, March 14, 2012. | (Photo: Reuters/Desmond Boylan)

Church officials in Cuba have asked for greater protections for their denominations but instead pastors are being monitored and threatened as believers face increased incidents of harassment by Communist officials, a persecution watchdog group reports.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide released its findings in a report on Thursday, noting that freedom of religion or belief continues to be violated in the country.

Both Protestant and Roman Catholic institutions have called for greater protections, but that has led to increased harassment of religious leaders, CSW has warned.

"Often this takes subtler, hard to document forms, and is focused on attempting to create divisions between and within religious groups," the watchdog explained in its summary.

"Religious leaders who have taken on a leadership role in the campaign, both at the local and national levels, have reported that pressure on them remains high; over the past year many have chosen to flee the country and to seek refuge abroad," it added.

"Leaders from the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches, both those belonging to and outside of the Cuban Council of Churches, report frequent visits from and meetings with state security agents and Cuban Communist Party officials. These visits and meetings seem to be intended to intimidate the religious leaders and make them aware that they are under close surveillance."

The report includes several examples of the harassment churches are facing. It also noted that a number of church leaders from various denominations have reported on frequent visits from state security or Communist Party agents.

“Some have reported warnings from the agents and officials that the education of their children, or their own employment, could be threatened if the house church leaders continue with their activities,” the report says.

“In August a government official paid a number of visits to house churches linked to one pastor in central Cuba. The officials threatened the owners of the homes and pressured them to stop allowing their homes to be used for religious activity. Officials threatened one owner, an elderly woman, with criminal charges if more than 10 people met in her home at any one time.”

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CSW makes several recommendations to world leaders, including the United Nations and the United States government, about how to address this issue.

"The State Department should continue to closely monitor FORB in Cuba and consider adding the country to the Special Watch List," it asked of the U.S. government.

"The State Department should ensure that all FORB reporting fully reflects the views of marginalized churches and faith leaders, rather than positions of state officials and offices."

Michael Mutzner, the permanent representative to the U.N. in Geneva of the World Evangelical Alliance, wrote in an op-ed for The Christian Post earlier this year that evangelicals in Cuba are often controlled and repressed, but are still growing.

Mutzner noted that evangelicals make up about 10 percent of the Cuban population, with most churches facing some forms of restrictions.

“Churches established after 1959 in Cuba face the most difficult conditions, because they are considered illegal. They represent 12 percent of Cuban evangelicals. Some are in the country since over 30 years but are still unable to register with the ministry of justice of Cuba,” he told CP about churches in the most difficult situations.

“Their meeting locations can be destroyed, and their leaders arrested. Thus, dozens of pastors are regularly harassed and arrested. Some have been unjustly sentenced in court, such as pastor Núñez Velázquez who was sentenced on October 2016 to one-year house arrest.”

https://www.christianpost.com

Dean Dettloff July 23, 2019

“It is when the Communists are good that they are dangerous.”

That is how Dorothy Day begins an article in America, published just before the launch of the Catholic Worker on May Day in 1933. In contrast to the reactions of many Catholics of the time, Day painted a sympathetic, if critical view of the communists she encountered in Depression-era New York City. Her deep personalism allowed her to see the human stories through the ideological struggle; and yet she concluded that Catholicism and communism were not only incompatible, but mutual threats. A whole Cold War has passed since her reflection, and a few clarifying notes are now worthwhile.

Communists are attracted to communism by their goodness, Day argued, that unerasable quality of the good that can be found within and outside the church alike, woven into our very nature. It might have been an easier thing to say back in 1933, when American communists were well known to the general public for putting their lives on the line to support striking workers, but it was also the kind of thing that could land you in a lot of trouble, not least in the Catholic Church.

By affirming the goodness that drives so many communists then and now, Day aimed to soften the perceptions of Catholics who were more comfortable with villainous caricatures of the communists of their era than with more challenging depictions of them as laborers for peace and economic justice. Most people who join communist parties and movements, Day rightly noted, are motivated not by some deep hatred toward God or frothing anti-theism, but by an aspiration for a world liberated from a political economy that demands vast exploitation of the many for the comfort of a few.

[Matt Malone, S.J.: Why we published an essay sympathetic to communism]

But in her attempt to create sympathy for the people attracted to communism and to overcome a knee-jerk prejudice against them, Day needlessly perpetuated two other prejudices against communism. First, she said that under all the goodness that draws people to communism, the movement is, in the final analysis, a program “with the distinct view of tearing down the church.”

Then, talking about a young communist in her neighborhood who was killed after being struck by a brick thrown by a Trotskyite, she concluded that young people who follow the goodness in their hearts that may lead them to communism are not fully aware of what it is they are participating in—even at the risk of their lives. In other words, we should hate the communism but love the communist.

Though Day’s sympathetic criticism of communism is in many ways commendable, nearly a century of history shows there is much more to the story than these two judgments suggest. Communist political movements the world over have been full of unexpected characters, strange developments and more complicated motivations than a desire to undo the church; and even through the challenges of the 20th century, Catholics and communists have found natural reasons to offer one another a sign of peace.

A Complicated History

Christianity and communism have obviously had a complicated relationship. That adjective “complicated” will surely cause some readers to roll their eyes. Communist states and movements have indeed persecuted religious people at different moments in history. At the same time, Christians have been passionately represented in communist and socialist movements around the world. And these Christians, like their atheist comrades, are communists not because they misunderstand the final goals of communism but because they authentically understand the communist ambition of a classless society.

“From each according to ability, to each according to need,” Marx summarizes in “Critique of the Gotha Program,” a near echo of Luke’s description of the early church in Acts 4:35 and 11:29. Perhaps it was Day, not her young communist neighbor, who misunderstood communism.

It is true that Marx, Engels, Lenin and a number of other major communists were committed Enlightenment thinkers, atheists who sometimes assumed religion would fade away in the bright light of scientific reason, and at other times advocated propagandizing against it (though not, as Lenin argued, in a way that would divide the movement against capitalism, the actual opponent). That should not be so scandalous in itself. They are hardly alone as modern atheists, and their atheism is understandable, when Christianity has so often been a force allied to the ruling powers that exploit the poor. Catholics have found plenty of philosophical resources in non-Christian sources in the past; why not moderns?

Despite and beyond theoretical differences, priests like Herbert McCabe, O.P., Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, S.J., Frei Betto, O.P., Camilo Torres and many other Catholics—members of the clergy, religious and laypeople—have been inspired by communists and in many places contributed to communist and communist-influenced movements as members. Some still do—for example in the Philippines, where the “Christians for National Liberation,” an activist group first organized by nuns, priests and exploited Christians, are politically housed within the National Democratic Front, a coalition of movements that includes a strong communist thread currently fighting the far-right authoritarian leader Rodrigo Duterte.

Closer to home and outside of armed struggles, Christians are also present today in communist movements in the United States and Canada. Whatever hostilities may have existed in the past, some of these movements are quite open to Christian participation now. Many of my friends in the Party for Socialism and Liberation, for example, a Marxist-Leninist party, are churchgoing Christians or folks without a grudge against their Christian upbringing, as are lots of people in the radical wing of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Communist Party USA has published essays affirming the connections between Christianity and communism and encouraging Marxists not to write off Christians as hopelessly lost to the right (the C.P.U.S.A. paper, People’s World, even reported on Sister Simone Campbell and Network’s Nuns on the Bus campaign to agitate for immigration reform). In Canada, Dave McKee, former leader of the Communist Party of Canada in Ontario, was once an Anglican theology student at a Catholic seminary, radicalized in part by his contact with base communities in Nicaragua. For my part, I have talked more about Karl Rahner, S.J., St. Óscar Romero and liberation theology at May Day celebrations and communist meetings than at my own Catholic parish.

In other words, though some communists would undoubtedly prefer a world without Christianity, communism is not simply a program for destroying the church. Many who committed their very lives to the church felt compelled to work alongside communists as part of their Christian calling. The history of communism, whatever else it might be, will always contain a history of Christianity, and vice versa, whether members of either faction like it or not.

Communism in its socio-political expression has at times caused great human and ecological suffering. Any good communist is quick to admit as much, not least because communism is an unfinished project that depends on the recognition of its real and tragic mistakes.

But communists are not the only ones who have to answer for creating human suffering. Far from being a friendly game of world competition, capitalism, Marx argued, emerged through the privatization of what was once public, like shared land, a process enforced first by physical violence and then continued by law. As time went on, human beings themselves would become the private property of other human beings.

[Questions or comments about this essay? Join the author for a live Q&A on America’s Facebook page on Thursday, July 25 at 2 p.m. EST]

Colonial capitalism, together with the assumptions of white supremacy, ushered in centuries of unbridled terrorism on populations around the world, creating a system in which people could be bought and sold as commodities. Even after the official abolition of slavery in the largest world economies—which required a costly civil war in the United States—the effects of that system live on, and capitalist nations and transnational companies continue to exploit poor and working people at home and abroad. For many people around the globe today, being on the wrong side of capitalism can still mean the difference between life and death.

What Motivates a Communist?

Communism has provided one of the few sustainable oppositions to capitalism, a global political order responsible for the ongoing suffering of millions. It is that suffering, reproduced by economic patterns that Marx and others tried to explain, and not the secret plot of atheism (as Day once argued), that motivates communists.

According to a report by Oxfam released in 2018, global inequality is staggering and still on the rise. Oxfam, which is not run by communists, observed that “82 percent of the wealth created [in 2017] went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity got nothing.”

While entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are investing in space travel, their workers are grounded in daily economic struggle here on earth. In Mr. Musk’s Tesla factories, workers suffer serious injuries more than twice the industrial average, and they report being so exhausted that they collapse on the factory floor.

An undercover journalist reports workers urinate into bottles in a U.K. Amazon warehouse for fear of being disciplined for “idle time,” and the company has a long list of previous offenses. In Pennsylvania, Amazon workers needed medical attention both for exposure to the cold in the winter and for heat exhaustion in the summer. These hardly seem like prices worth paying so a few billionaires can vacation in the black expanse of space. As one Detroit Tesla worker put it: “Everything feels like the future but us.”

For communists, global inequality and the abuse of workers at highly profitable corporations are not the result only of unkind employers or unfair labor regulations. They are symptoms of a specific way of organizing wealth, one that did not exist at the creation of the world and one that represents part of a “culture of death,” to borrow a familiar phrase. We already live in a world where wealth is redistributed, but it goes up, not down or across.

Though polls show U.S. citizens have become increasingly skeptical of capitalism—one Gallup survey even reports that Democrats currently view socialism more positively than capitalism—that attitude is not widely popular among electoral representatives. A revival of socialist hysteria typified the response to Bernie Sanders’s inspiring 2016 primary bid and the electoral success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a party co-founded by a former Catholic Worker, Michael Harrington. Republican and Democratic politicians have made it abundantly clear that whatever their differences, they both agree that in U.S. political culture support for capitalism is non-negotiable, as Nancy Pelosi told a socialist questioner during a CNN town hall.

Communists are not content with the back-and-forth of capitalist parties, who point fingers at one another while maintaining, jointly, a system that exploits multitudes of people, including their own constituents. Communists think we can build better ways of being together in society.

[Questions or comments about this essay? Join the author for a live Q&A on America’s Facebook page on Thursday, July 25 at 2 p.m. EST]

Contrary to the fear that communists simply want everyone’s “stuff,” the abolition of private property, for which Marx and Engels called, means the abolition of privately owned ways of generating wealth, not taking the clothes off your back or your dad’s tie collection. As the popular saying in communist circles goes, communists do not want your toothbrush. Some of the standard proposals in the programs of communist parties include things like providing free health care, abolishing private profit from renting property and the creation of truly democratic institutions in which politicians are not millionaires and are subject to recall.

In fact, although the Catholic Church officially teaches that private property is a natural right, this teaching also comes with the proviso that private property is always subordinate to the common good. So subordinate, says Pope Francis in a truly radical moment in “Laudato Si’,” that “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.”

Something like this is paralleled in “The Communist Manifesto,” when Marx and Engels underscore that abolishing private property means abolishing not personal property, or the kinds of things an artisan or farmer might own, but the amassed property held by the rich, which divides human beings into antagonistic classes of people—in other words, the kind of private property that most of us do not have.

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” Marx and Engels say to their bourgeois detractors. “But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

[Matt Malone, S.J.: Why we published an essay sympathetic to communism]

Instead, they write that property should be transformed. In a passage not too far from Pope Francis’ bold sentence above, Marx and Engels say: “When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.”

What communists desire is an authentically common life together, and they think that can only happen by relativizing property in light of the good of everyone. Radical indeed, but certainly not all that shocking to people who remember when the Virgin Mary sang that God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty (Lk 1:53).

Dorothy Day and Christian Communism

Dorothy Day seemed to recognize the deeper motivations for communism later on, changing her judgment of good communists to suggest perhaps there is also good communism. Her article in America was written at the beginning of the Great Depression. Twenty years later, Fidel Castro and comrades founded the 26th of July Movement. That effort in 1959 ousted Fulgencio Batista, whose regime was infamous for torturing or killing thousands of Cubans while enjoying support from the United States.

Reflecting on the Cuban revolution in The Catholic Worker in 1961, Day offered a complex perspective on the persecution of some Catholics following the revolution. Nevertheless, she wrote, “It is hard...to say that the place of The Catholic Worker is with the poor, and that being there, we are often finding ourselves on the side of the persecutors of the Church. This is a tragic fact.”

Day reminded her readers that Castro emphasized he was not against the church or Catholics as such (he knew Catholics in the revolution, after all) but against those factions within Cuba that would prefer to cling to the old regime, built on the oppression of Cuba’s people. Castro had not only permitted priests and nuns to stay in Cuba, Day wrote, but affirmed that the church endured through monarchies, republics and in feudalist states. “Why cannot she exist under a socialist state?” she asked. She noted many Jesuits would stay in Cuba to work in parishes and added that the Jesuits already had experience living through periods of persecution and suppression.

But Dorothy Day was not open only to the begrudging possibility that the Cuban church might not be wiped out by socialism. She went further: “We are on the side of the revolution. We believe there must be new concepts of property, which is proper to [humanity], and that the new concept is not so new. There is a Christian communism and a Christian capitalism.

“God Bless the priests and people of Cuba. God bless Castro and all those who are seeing Christ in the poor,” she said. A year later, Day visited Cuba to see the revolutionary society for herself. In a series of dispatches to The Catholic Worker, she reported glowingly, albeit not without noting the many problems the young society had to solve, problems she hoped could in fact be solved with a little communist ingenuity.

Spanning over a century now, communists—Christians and non-Christians—have fought against a violent capitalist economy, putting their lives and freedoms at risk, enduring character assassination, imprisonment and war. Whether or not one is convinced by the communist hope of abolishing private property, it is undeniable that communists have provided a real, material challenge to a global system that the most powerful world governments have every intention of perpetuating. The loss of a mass communist movement, due in large part to an aggressive legal and political persecution by the United States and other governments, has made organizing opposition to capitalism itself a difficult task; but even in its absence, a majority of millennials reject capitalism.

As Marx and Engels put it in “The Communist Manifesto”: “In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” It is with that hope for free development, beyond the competition of capitalists, that many Catholics, myself included, count themselves among the communists.

So Dorothy Day was right when she said it is when the communists are good that they are dangerous. Communists are pursuing the good when they are dangerous; they are opposing an economic system based on avarice, exploitation and human suffering, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. And in a world beholden to an economy of death, one that is crippling our “common home,” as Pope Francis tells us, and asserting itself as the end of history, we must also add: It is when the communists are dangerous that they are good.

[Questions or comments about this essay? Join the author for a live Q&A on America’s Facebook page on Thursday, July 25 at 2 p.m. EST]

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Not so menacing ,” in the August 5, 2019, issue.

More: Dorothy Day / Economics / US Politics

Dean Dettloff

Dean Dettloff is America's Toronto correspondent and a junior member of the Institute for Christian Studies.

@deandettloff

Pope Francis accepts the resignation

of the Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn,

the Cuban Octavio Cisneros

Cisneros thanks Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and Pope Benedict for granting

him the fullness of the priesthood in 2006.

DDC

New York 30 Oct 2020 - 17:28 CET

The Cuban priest Octavio Cisneros.

Jorge Domínguez-López thetablet.org

Ecclesiastical authorities announced this Friday that

Pope Francis accepted

the resignation of Cuban father Octavio Cisneros from

the position of auxiliary

 bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn, in the United States.

"I am grateful to Bishop Cisneros for his willingness

to serve and I had

 the honor of ordaining and consecrating him

as Auxiliary Bishop

on June 6, 2006. He will remain pastor at the

 Church of the Holy Child Jesus

and Saint Benedict Joseph Labre in Richmond Hill,

Queens and he

 will continue to serve as Vicar for Hispanic Concerns,

"said the Rev.

Nicholas DiMarzio, Bishop of Brooklyn.

He thanked the prelate "for his years of diocesan leadership"

and showed satisfaction "that he continues to serve the

Dioceses in Brooklyn and Queens."

As required by canon law, upon reaching 75 years of age,

 all bishops

must present a letter of resignation from

the ecclesiastical office they hold.

It is up to the Holy See to determine when to accept

that resignation.

In the case of auxiliary bishops, acceptance of a resignation

typically occurs shortly after their 75th birthday,

notes a press release

from the Diocese of Brooklyn.

"I am very grateful to Pope Benedict and Bishop DiMarzio

for giving me

the fullness of the priesthood in 2006 so I can help minister

as

an auxiliary bishop, which has been rewarding

and satisfying for me,"

Cisneros said.

"I am grateful to Pope Francis for his continued support

of our bishops.

He is an inspiration to all of us. I have lived a

very happy priesthood

 in the Diocese of Brooklyn for 49 years and I look forward

to continuing

 my priestly ministry," added the

Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Brooklyn.

Bishop Cisneros was born in Las Villas, province of Cuba,

on July 19, 1945. In October 1961, while he was

a high school student,

he arrived in the United States as a political refugee as part of

Operation Peter Pan.

He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn on May 29, 1971

and has been pastor at the Church of the Holy Child Jesus and

St. Benedict Joseph Labre since 2007. He has also served at

 the Church of San Miguel and as pastor of the Church of

Our Lady of Dolores in Corona.

Throughout his priesthood, he has been

 appointed as Episcopal,

or Territorial Vicar, in the Eastern Vicariate of Brooklyn,

and as rector of the Cathedral Seminary residence in

Douglaston.

He was appointed prelate of honor by

Pope John Paul II in 1988.

Bishop Cisneros has also been involved with the

Northeast Catholic Center

 for Hispanics, the "National Hispanic Institute of Liturgy,"

the Episcopal Liturgy Committee, and the

Pastors Advisory Committee.

He has been a member of the Seminary of the Board of

 Governors of the Immaculate Conception and as

 former president

of the Conference of Diocesan Directors for the Spanish Apostolate.

https://diariodecuba.com

When America Hated Catholics

In the late 19th century, statesmen feared that Catholic immigrants were less than civilized (and less than white).

In the late nineteenth century, political cartoonist Thomas Nast regularly lambasted Irish Catholic immigrants as drunkards and barbarians unfit for citizenship; signs that read, “No Irish Need Apply,” lined shop windows in Boston and New York and dotted the classified pages in many of the country’s leading papers; statesmen warned about the dangers of admitting Catholics from Southern and Eastern Europe onto American shores, for fear that they were something less than civilized (and less than white). It wasn’t unusual for respectable politicians to wonder aloud whether Catholics could be loyal to their adoptive country and to the Pope.

What a difference a few decades can make. Today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these Catholic immigrants occupy the halls of Congress, governors’ mansions and state legislatures. One of them currently resides in the Naval Observatory. And when the head of the Catholic Church comes to visit, he will be warmly welcomed and hailed by politicians of all parties and all faiths.

Indeed, America has traveled a long road since the days when many native-born Americans regarded Catholic immigrants as an ideological and racial threat.

But it’s also a fitting time to recall how things once were. Pope Francis arrives amid a political season rife with violent rhetoric directed at millions of Catholic immigrants and their American-born children. Much like an earlier generation of newcomers who faced a toxic blend of racial and nativist backlash, today’s Catholic immigrants have found themselves the unwitting subject of an intense debate about the very meaning of what it means to be an American.

***

Between 1840 and 1924, over 30 million European immigrants relocated to the United States. Many were Catholic, hailing from as far North as Ireland, as far South as Sicily and as far east as Poland. In a country established principally by English-speaking Protestants who traced their ancestry to Northern Europe, these newcomers often met with hostility and derision. From the burning of Boston’s Charlestown Convent in 1834 and the rise of the single-issue, anti-immigrant Know Nothing party in the 1850s (an organization that, for a brief moment, controlled dozens of congressional seats and enjoyed extensive influence within the political anti-slavery coalition)—to the No Irish Need Apply signs of the 1890s—immigrant Catholics faced the brunt of Protestant America’s rage.

In the era of mass immigration, anti-Catholicism often found expression around the issue of education. Rightly fearing that native Protestants wished to inject public schools with an evangelical and sectarian spirit, Catholics created a sweeping, parallel system.

Naturally, they expected (though almost never received) a fair share of tax money to support this system. As a reaction to this trend, in the 1880s, over 30 states adopted so-called Blaine Amendments (named after U.S. Senator James G. Blaine) barring any state funds for these separatist schools. The issue remained a point of contention well into the mid-20th century.

It was never easy to separate the racial and religious components of anti-Catholic sentiment. Until the 1920s, America’s doors were open to European immigrants, as long as they qualified under a statute passed in 1790 that reserved naturalized citizenship for “free white persons.” Whether Southern and Eastern Europeans of darker hue—or all Catholics, whose presumed loyalty to Rome rendered them suspect candidates for democratic citizenship—qualified under the statute, seemed very much an open question.

As the immigrant landscape grew more complicated in the late 19th century, social scientists and politicians began attempting to classify Americans with greater precision. Whitness, it now seemed, was a matter of degree, and Europeans fell into categories like “Anglo Saxon,” “Celtic,” “Hebrew” and “Asiatic.” Importantly, this move toward racial classification drew heavily on the emerging fields of modern biology and chemistry. In this sense, modern science and social science were contemporaries—and close cousins—of modern racism.

In 1911 the famous Dillingham Commission on Immigration attempted to reduce the mass of new immigrant groups to a simple five-tier racial scheme (Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay and American). But it wasn’t always so simple. In Volume 9 of its lengthy report, otherwise entitled A Dictionary of Races or Peoples, the commission backtracked and acknowledged that the U.S. Bureau of Immigration “recognizes 45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe.

Critically, many scientists and social scientists (the Dillingham Commission experts among them) agreed that race was determinative of behavior, intelligence and physical endowment, and that racial groups could be arranged in a hierarchical fashion. The Dictionary of Races or Peoples, for instance, characterized Bohemians as “the most advanced of all” Slavic race groups. The Southern Italian, on the other hand, it deemed “an individualist having little adaptability to highly organized society.”

Representative of this popular school of thought was the Station for the Study of Evolution, a think tank established by the Carnegie Institution in 1904 at Cold Spring Harbor (Long Island). The institute’s director, Charles Davenport, made it his life’s work to document the relationship between race and comportment. “The idea of a ‘melting pot,’” he wrote, “belongs to a pre-Mendelian age. Now we recognize that characters are inherited as units and do not readily break up.” From arguing that race was both determinative and qualitative, it was no great leap of logic to suggest some racial groups were better fit for citizenship than others.

Senator Ira Hersey of Maine lamented, “We have thrown open wide our gates and through them have come other alien races, of alien blood, from Asia and southern Europe … with their strange and pagan rites, their babble of tongues.” (When he spoke of “pagan rites,” Hersey almost assuredly meant both the Latin Mass and the Hebrew service.) Congressman Earl Michener of Michigan only echoed conventional wisdom when he argued, “the Nordic [race] laid the foundations of society in America,” and to compromise Nordic genius was pure race suicide.

Notably, Catholic immigrants rarely qualified as racially fit.

***

In the early 20th century, the backlash against Catholic and Jewish immigrants found its most powerful expression in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization born in the 1860s in violent opposition to the emancipation of black slaves.

Unlike the original Klan, the new organization sought a national profile and identified several groups—not just African Americans—as alien threats to family and nation: Catholics, Jews, immigrants, “new women,” bootleggers, criminals and—of course—black Americans. In effect, the Klan became the sworn enemy of all persons who threatened, whether by heritage, race or behavior, the imagined ideals that had so recently held a nation of small, Protestant communities together. Above all, the Klan touted “one hundred percent Americanism” as an antidote to the social and cultural decay that seemed to be rotting away the core of American values.

GO TO PAGE # 43

Apr 17, 2018

by Gail DeGeorge, Soli Salgado

World

Havana Cathedral, in Havana, Cuba (NCR photo/Soli Salgado)

HAVANA, CUBA, and MIAMI — For the first time in decades, Cuba's official leader will not have the last name of Castro.

The country's National Assembly selects a new president April 19, replacing Raúl Castro. He had taken the reins in 2006 when his older brother, Fidel — dictator since the country's 1959 revolution that put the Communist Party in power — fell ill. Heralded as an historic change by some, others deride it as meaningless because Raúl Castro remains the first secretary of the Communist Party and retains influence over decisions behind the scenes.

Yet real changes are quietly being made by the second-largest institution after the government in Cuba: the Catholic Church. Connections forged with Cuban-Americans are strengthening parishes, shoring up social services and extending beyond the Cuban church by offering business and entrepreneurship training to help rebuild civil society.

Pope John Paul II's 1998 visit to Cuba signaled a new era for the beleaguered church in which he urged, "May Cuba, with all its magnificent potential, open itself up to the world, and may the world open itself up to Cuba." Twenty years later, Cuban Catholics on both sides of the Florida Strait are joining together to do exactly that.

Cuba's outsized role in geopolitics is evident in visits by the last three popes, including Pope Francis in September 2015, just months after he helped broker the renewal of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

Yet the changes go far beyond the headlines generated by papal visits, and involve numerous bishops, priests, women religious and lay members of both countries. Building on a 20-year gradual reconciliation with many Catholic Cubans in the U.S., even in Miami — long a bastion of anti-Castro hardliner exiles who eschew any relations with Cuba — the efforts are marking a way forward and bridging the communities, even as relations between the two countries cool under the Trump administration.

"There's been a revitalization of the church" in Cuba, said Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, who has been to Cuba more than two dozen times since 1996, including the three papal visits. "The church has made progress — it's small steps. It's not what it used to be and it's not what it should be."

Openness after hardships

The Cuban Catholic Church is still recovering from the repression imposed shortly after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. By the end of 1961, hundreds of priests were jailed or expelled, lay leaders arrested and some killed, and Catholic schools nationalized, prompting hundreds of women and men religious to leave. Tens of thousands of Cubans fled to the U.S., Spain and other countries.

Practicing Catholics in Cuba were excluded for decades from the Communist Party, denied teaching and other jobs, and faced harassment. In meetings throughout dioceses on the island in the early 1980s, bishops, priests, women religious and lay people prepared for the National Encounter of the Catholic Church (ENEC) in 1986, "the first systematic grass-roots effort by the Catholic Church to come to terms with the changes wrought by the revolution," according to a working document.

The assessment was grim: Less than 2 percent of Cubans regularly attended Mass, there were about 200 priests, and discrimination was widespread. Yet from that meeting, the church emerged with renewed vigor and embraced its missionary role.

In 1992, Cuba officially declared it was a secular but no longer atheist state. But John Paul's 1998 visit "marks the before and after in the relation with the church, with the state and also with Cuban society," Wenski said. It "was almost a signal that it was safe to go to church again." A subsequent visit by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 and Fidel and Raúl Castro's warm welcome of Francis in 2015 strengthened the church's footing.

A statue of Pope John Paul II in Santa Clara, Cuba, in the place where he addressed the city in 1998. (NCR photo/Soli Salgado)

An estimated 60 percent of Cuba's population of about 11.5 million is Catholic, according to Vatican statistics. The U.S. Department of State cites 40-45 percent are at least "nominally" Catholic, and adds that Catholic officials say about 10 percent attend Mass regularly.

Key to the revitalization of the Cuban church is reconciliation, not only between Cuban-Americans and Cubans but among Cubans themselves, Wenski and others said. Surveillance is common in Cuba, with neighbors, students, teachers and others reporting activities viewed as contrary to party ideals to Communist Party and government officials.

"Every Cuban has been betrayed by somebody else," Wenski said. "If you're going to have what I like to call a 'soft landing' rather than a 'hard landing' when this changes — and I think the changes are going to happen inevitably — what the church is hoping for and trying to promote is a soft landing without a lot of violence and disorder. For that to happen, there's going to have to be a lot of reconciliation."

"The greatest witness has been to open the doors to those who left the church or fought against us and do it without any reproach and integrate them into our communities."
—Laura Maria Fernandez

That point is underscored by Laura Maria Fernandez, secretary of the Cuban church's coordinating team Encuentro Eclesial, a group of Cuban bishops, priests, women religious and laypeople both on the island and in exile. For 20 years, the group has been building connections and trust.

"For me, the greatest witness of faith of the church that lives in Cuba were not the sufferings of the decades from the '60s to the '80s," she said in an email to NCR. "The greatest witness has been to open the doors to those who left the church or fought against us and do it without any reproach and integrate them into our communities. I think that is precisely what the Cuban diaspora does not understand very well in the United States."

While the Cuban church maintains connections with Latin America and Spain, support from the exile community in the U.S. is notable, given the long-standing bitterness and prevailing hardline view for decades, especially in Miami, that helping Cubans helps the Castro regime retain power.

That stance is softening amid waves of successive Cuban refugees who still have families on the island, and as younger Cuban-Americans take leadership roles. Even former hardliners such as business executive Carlos Saladrigas, who five years ago helped start and finance an entrepreneurship training program run by the church in three Cuban dioceses, have found common Catholic connections as a way to engage with the changes slowly taking place in Cuba.

"The most important role for the Cuban-American community, period, is one of support for Cuban civil society," he said. "We are a chorus, behind the scenes staffers; that's what we need to be. We need to facilitate this process, but it's up to the Cubans. We are Cubans; I don't want to diminish that, but we don't live there, and when you do not live with the consequences of what you're proposing, it creates a very high ethical standard."

Saladrigas led vocal opposition against then-auxiliary bishop Wenski's proposal to have a cruise ship bring Miami pilgrims to Cuba for the visit of John Paul II. The plan was dropped. While watching the papal visit on television, Saladrigas said, "I began to say to myself, 'What have I done? I've made a huge mistake.' And I began to regret very much taking that position."

That marked a change in his approach to Cuba — be more measured and less reactive. He and other Cuban-Americans formed the Cuba Study Group, whose stated mission is to "help facilitate peaceful change in Cuba." He still faces "vicious" attacks by hardliners in Miami on radio stations and other media publications but stands by his convictions.

"It is far better to help the Cuban people even if it provides a collateral benefit to the regime, than it is to hurt the regime and at the same time collectively hurt the Cubans," he said. "That became a fundamental transformation for me."

Jesuit Fr. Alberto Garcia, who left Cuba in 1961 at age 17, faced some initial backlash from his family when he returned to Cuba between 1992 and 2001 and then received permission to enter as a Cuban national from 2001 to 2015 to minister in three parishes.

"My family here in Miami was not happy at all that I was working in Cuba," he said. They "figured I was not very loyal to democratic ideals, working with [the] Communist state," said Garcia, now a spiritual counselor at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami. While there is still suspicion and some opposition toward Cuba, he finds that attitude changing.

"The church here in the States has been a little bit more open to what has been happening to the church in Cuba than the regular Cuban-American population, which has been a lot more militant against any kind of help to the Cuban church," he said.

Some Cuban-Americans criticize the church in Cuba for conceding too much to the government and not supporting dissidents. Yet close observers say it must work within the boundaries or risk being shut out of influencing change, particularly at this critical time.

"The church is orchestrating a very difficult balancing act — it has to balance the internal dynamics with Cuba, relations with the state and the Cuban exile community," said Enrique Pumar, department chair of sociology at Santa Clara University, who has studied Cuba and the Catholic Church in Cuba. "So far they are doing a good job, but others would like them to be more active."

Rebuilding parishes

Fundamental to strengthening the Catholic Church is building — and rebuilding — parishes. Cuba's first new church in six decades plans to open within months, in the town of Sandino, in the region of Pinar del Rio, an initiative undertaken by one of three historically Cuban-American parishes in Tampa, Florida.

As with many efforts in Cuba, it began as a people-to-people connection, explained Fr. Ramon Hernandez, now a retired priest who assists at St. Lawrence Catholic Church in Tampa. A priest from his hometown of San Luis in Pinar del Rio was visiting him in 2010 and discussed the idea of building a new church in Cuba. They approached the then-pastor of St. Lawrence, who supported the effort. As publicity spread, about $95,000 was raised through the parish and from donations across the country and even abroad.

The 250-seat church, Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, will serve a parish community of about 600 active Catholics in a town of about 9,000, though there are many more who are baptized, Hernandez said. Catholics now meet in a house; there are about 5,000 such "house churches" in Cuba.

"The church has more space in the society and this put another step in this process," Hernandez said. Permits for new churches have been issued in Havana and Santiago, which he attributed to the efforts in Pinar del Rio.

New and repaired church buildings are important signs of vitality for the church in Cuba, but fostering strong church communities is even more so.

In his years in Cuba, "people started coming back to the church," said Garcia, who served in parishes in Havana, Matanzas and Camaguey. "There were a number of young people who came back with a great deal of hunger for values, and practically no religious background. So the parishes had kids tremendously hungry for knowledge, desperate to get Bibles."

There was a critical need for priests as the number had been capped at about 200 for decades. More priests were allowed in after the papal visits, including some from Miami for limited periods. There are now more than 350 priests in the country.

San Lazaro Catholic Church and Shrine in Hialeah, Florida, bordering Miami. The parish community, mostly Cuban exiles, helps support catechism programs in Cuba. (NCR photo/Soli Salgado)

Building parishes in Cuba is a slow process but yielding results, said Fr. José Espino, pastor of San Lazaro Catholic Church and Shrine in Hialeah, Florida, bordering Miami. In 1999, he was one of 132 religious workers allowed into Cuba and spent five years there, initially in the newly created parish of St. Joseph the Worker in the city of Guantanamo, his hometown. He had left Cuba at age 5 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, a mass exodus of unaccompanied minors out of Cuba, from December 1960 to October 1962.

"A lot of it was sitting on the porch and welcoming people and inserting yourself slowly into the community," he said of getting non-practicing Catholics back to church. "That's basically one of the first things I did — just welcoming people."

Mass was celebrated in the living room of a house until numbers grew and it moved outside. The parish community numbered about 100 when Espino left in 2002 for another parish in Cuba. He returns every year and notices growth in the number of parishioners and that a small chapel has been built.

In 2002, he became pastor of a church in Baracoa, the oldest parish in Cuba, established in 1512 in an isolated, mountainous region. A lot of flexibility was needed, as there were still tensions with local government officials, Espino said. The parish would plan an event for a day, only to have local party officials plan something for that same day. Music would blare from a nearby park, disrupting Mass. "That tension has slowly diminished," he said.

Now from his vantage point in Hialeah, he sees support for the church in Cuba continuing to grow in the Miami community. Young priests from Cuba often come to him and other Cuban priests in Miami to ask for help. "Anytime there's a priest or a layperson from Cuba here, people help them out monetarily — and you build the bridges — it's people-to-people bridges."

He gives mission talks for Cuban parishes and a lay-led effort in his parish helps support catechism programs on the island, providing $50 a month for snacks, transportation and some outreach. He has worked with a food program for the elderly in Santiago. The efforts are low profile — not just for lingering sensitivities in Miami, but also for the watchful eyes of the Cuban government.

"It's done very quietly — everything is done very quietly," Espino said. "With Cuba, the less you talk the more you do."

Also quietly filling the gaps in social services are congregations of women religious in Cuba, who tailor their ministries to local needs: some run day cares, offer alternative education courses, or run a home for those with disabilities. Other efforts are led by laypeople and operate with the help of Catholic U.S. organizations, opening community centers and chapels in impoverished farmlands.

But none describe themselves as supplements to government programs, and instead are careful to stress that these efforts are related to evangelization.

Home churches — "casas de misión" — are important signs of missionary vitality of the church, said Fr. Juan Sosa, pastor of St. Joseph in Miami Beach who travels to Cuba frequently. Sosa also was the coordinator for many years for the Encuentro Eclesial group of priests, women religious and laity who meet periodically.

"It's marvelous, the activity that they do. Since they couldn't build churches in 59 years, they gather in [the] homes [of] sisters or a layperson, and the priest goes and they have a celebration of the word and then those places become parishes or communities."

Fr. Juan Sosa, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Miami Beach, points to a photo of participants in Encuentro Eclesial, a group of Cuban and Cuban American bishops, priests, women religious and lay people who have been meeting 20 years to help bridge divisions and foster better communication. (NCR photo/Soli Salgado)

Caritas Cuba is a key example of the growing connection between the church in Cuba and the church in the U.S., particularly the exile community. Caritas Cuba runs day care, feeding programs for the elderly, and disaster relief assistance, supported by the Friends of Caritas Cubana, a Boston-based fundraising program run by Cuban exiles. Besides the money raised to help Cubans, the program has helped build connections between Cubans on the island and exiles, says Consuelo Isaacson, chair and president.

"I take people with me who are interested and the connection when we get there is so real and strong – we are the same people," Isaacson said. "We travel with the Caritas people to see the programs and can sit down to chat with them as if we have been best friends forever. There has been reconciliation in the air on both sides."

One impediment to rebuilding the church in Cuba are the large number of priests and trained laity who leave for the U.S. and other countries. "The problem with Cuba is that we train laypeople and they leave — that's a reality," Espino said. "There's a brain drain. If you want to see the fruits of the church in Cuba, look to the church in Miami."

Yet a lay-led retreat program called Emmaus is cited by Wenski, Sosa and others as a sign of both connections between the Cuban-American church community and growing vitality of the church in Cuba. The parish-based spiritual retreats originated in St. Louis Catholic Church in Pinecrest, near Miami, and have since spread throughout the U.S. and other countries including Colombia, Guatemala and Spain.

First efforts were rocky. One group that tried to hold the retreats in Cuba a few years ago had their Bibles confiscated and were turned back by the government. At the invitation of Cuban bishops, Cubans from Miami traveled to Cuba to conduct the first men's Emmaus retreat last year.

"We had to be very careful on what we said because people are taught that Fidel Castro is God — it's 60 years of having this impounded on their brains," said one of the Miami organizers, who asked that his name not be used for concern that the Cuban government might stop the retreats. Five men's retreats have been held in Cuba since the beginning of 2017, and the first women's retreat took place last year.

The retreats are effective, he said. "Now men are going to church where before it was just women," the organizer said, emphasizing the importance of it being done at the lay level. "That's where change really happens. It strengthens the belief that no matter if you're a communist, if you have this encounter with Christ, no political agenda is going to change that."

The Felix Valera Cultural Center in Havana (NCR photo/Soli Salgado)

Training entrepreneurs

One of the newest endeavors for the church in Cuba is alternative education and entrepreneurial training — often with support from Cubans in the U.S. and elsewhere. The operations are sensitive and keep a low profile for worry that the government might shut them down.

At the Felix Varela Cultural Center, a former Jesuit seminary in Cuba before a new seminary was opened in 2010 just outside Havana, bachelor's and master's programs are offered in humanities and business. Some 2,500 students have graduated from the program in five years, certified through the University of Florence, a public university in Florence, Italy, under an international education agreement. The center also screens movies and hosts music lessons, as one of its chief objectives is to expose students to the humanities.

Also offered is an 80-hour, one-month course program on entrepreneurship, which Saladrigas helped start. The Proyecto Cuba Emprende (Cuba Emprende Project ) now operates through archdioceses in Havana, Cienfuegos and Camaguey, and has trained and graduated more than 5,000 people. About 70 percent have started businesses within the small business spectrum permitted by the government, said Saladrigas — in information technology, manufacturing, candle-making, consulting, and telephone repair — though the efforts are heavily taxed and regulated.

Students play instruments at the Felix Valera Cultural Center, which emphasizes the humanities. (NCR photo/Soli Salgado)

The project operates through the dioceses and is locally run, he said. The Cuba Emprende Foundation provides overall guidance and financial resources. Participants are "highly educated and with incredible experiences," Saladrigas said. It is known only through word of mouth, but the government still keeps a watchful eye on the program.

"We try to be as low-key as we can, but the operation is so large and so visible that it's impossible to keep low-key," he said. "But from day one, we made sure that there are no politics involved, absolutely. That is clear and everybody knows that this is strictly to help people gain the skills they need to operate a small business."

St. Thomas University, sponsored by the Miami Archdiocese, will graduate its first 30 students next month in Santiago, Cuba, with master of science in management degrees, offered primarily to clergy, staff and lay leaders.

Challenges ahead — church's role

While a lot of the major initiatives under the Obama administration are still in place, President Donald Trump's harsh rhetoric and a State Department travel warning has chilled tourism. The U.S. has also withdrawn most of its personnel from the embassy after they complained of unexplained medical symptoms. That makes it harder for Cubans to get visas to the U.S. and has encouraged hardliners in both Cuba and Miami who want to keep relations distant and with little contact between the countries. The change is hurting tourism to Cuba and affecting small businesses, which are down 50 to 60 percent from 2016, Saladrigas said.

Tensions are also rising amid the challenges facing Cuba's new president — anticipated to be Miguel Diaz-Canel — a weak economy in need of major reforms, damage from 2017's Hurricane Irma, an aging population and a younger generation eager for change.

For Saladrigas, that means the church has a particular role to play.

"The church has a magisterial duty toward the people of Cuba, and it has a duty to provide a certain kind of moral leadership for society, and as Cuba faces its normal issues and mounting difficulties, I think the voice of the church needs to be heard in a calm, thoughtful, prayerful and intellectual way," Saladrigas said.

"It has weight. The church needs to look for ways to be relevant to Cuba's future, and it won't do that by falling back into a safe, quiet, pastoral role. It needs to do more."

He is disappointed, for instance, that Cuban bishops didn't do more to support a January letter written by three priests to Raúl Castro, published on Miami-based website CubaNet outlining economic and social issues facing the country and asking for true and open elections.

"The bishops were totally silent about the priests' letter; it's like it didn't even happen," Saladrigas said. "The church needs to show more leadership."

Yet Wenski, Pumar and others caution that the church is limited in its actions.

"It has dissenters on both sides but the church is moving forward gradually and incrementally and is banking on a very long-term process," Wenski said. "They know this reconciliation isn't going to happen overnight — it's going to take a generation or two, but if you're consistent and work toward that goal there will be benefits."

The personal relationship that developed between Raúl Castro and former Havana Archbishop Jaime Ortega was crucial to the cooperative relationship that developed between the church and the state, said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. Archbishop Juan Garcia Rodriguez replaced Ortega, who retired in April 2017. While LeoGrande doesn't expect major changes between the Cuban government and the church, "We have a new archbishop and a new Cuban president and will see what kind of relationship develops," he said.

The Catholic Church in Cuba has to steer clear of political involvement, but its growing ties with both the community in Cuba and Cuban-Americans makes the church an indispensable player in the political future in Cuba, Pumar said.

"This is an important source of leverage for the Catholic Church," Pumar said. "The opposition is very weak in Cuba, so the only institution that can really talk to both sides and appear to be objective and is protected in some forms by the Vatican is the Catholic Church."

[Gail DeGeorge is editor of Global Sisters Report. Her email address is gdegeorge@ncronline.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GailDeGeorge. Soli Salgado is a staff writer for Global Sisters Report. Her email address is ssalgado@ncronline.org. Follow her on Twitter @soli_salgado.]

Editor's note: Watch for more stories on Cuba, coming later this week on NCRonline.org and Global

Sisters Report.

Read this next: Where Cuban government can't provide, sisters and Catholic organizations fill the gaps

Klan members often infused their reflexive anti-Catholicism with a voyeuristic interest in the Catholic Church’s rumored (and wholly fictitious) violations of sexual propriety. Klan literature chronicled the delight that nuns took in whipping young girls. It claimed that members of the Knights of Columbus vowed to “burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive [non-Catholic] heretics; rip open the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” Popular Klan lecturers like Helen Jackson, an “escaped nun,” regaled listeners with tales of carnal relationships between priests and nuns and forced abortions within convent walls.

For a few years in the early 1920s, the Invisible Empire (as the Klan was also known) was a strong political force, controlling political affairs in Indiana, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado and exerting tremendous influence in many other states.

Notably, the Klan was not just an agent of rural backlash. As Catholics quickly came to forge demographic majorities and supermajorities in American cities, the organization thrived in many urban areas as an agent of resistance to rising Catholic political influence.

Nationally, these machinations came to a head in 1924, when thousands of delegates and alternates to the Democratic National Convention met at New York City’s Madison Square Garden to agree on a campaign platform and a presidential ticket. This was no small feat for a party rife with divisions between its rural and urban constituencies, its Northeast-Midwest alliance and its Southern-Western wing, and its “wet” (opposed to prohibition) and “dry” (for prohibition) contingents. Even without the Klan there to stir things up, the convention would likely have been a raucous affair.

Coming into the convention, the two leading candidates for the presidential nomination were New York Governor Al Smith, an Irish Catholic and notorious “wet,” and William Gibbs McAdoo, a handsome and courtly Southern transplant to California whose credentials included tenure as Treasury secretary under his father-in-law, Woodrow Wilson, and a successful career in business and law.

McAdoo was no bigot. He had spoken out for pluralism and tolerance in a high-profile address at the University of Southern California the year before. His two chief managers at the convention were a Jew and a Catholic. Neither was McAdoo a perfect representative of rural and small-town America. He had spent most of his adult life navigating the corridors of power on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C.

Yet he quickly became the preferred candidate of a loose coalition that included delegates from the rural South and West, supporters of prohibition and the Klan. The pairing of the first two groups made sense: rural Southerners and Westerners tended to be staunch evangelical Protestants and to endorse the prohibition enacted by the Eighteenth Amendment. These delegates had plenty of cause to oppose the nomination of Al Smith, the archetypal big-city “wet.” But many of McAdoo’s supporters were in a bind over the Klan. They clearly opposed the organization and were embarrassed by its support for their candidate. At the same time, they feared angering and alienating the considerable minority of delegates who belonged to the Invisible Empire. McAdoo’s forces resolved to avoid the Klan issue altogether—to take no position for or against the organization—in order to repair a breech in their ranks and improve their chances of attaining the magic two-thirds vote needed to garner the nomination. The strategy quickly unraveled.

Whether for political gain (to weaken McAdoo’s candidacy) or out of personal motivation (many ethnic delegates honestly believed the Klan was a dangerous and un-American institution), Smith’s supporters initiated a hard-fought battle to include a denunciation of the Klan in the party’s 1924 platform. The proposed language, which singled out the organization for special censure, delved the already fractious party into an all-out civil war. For five days, delegates broke into angry jeers and accusations. First fights broke out within and between different state delegations. Smith’s New York partisans shouted “Ku Klux McAdoo!” to which the California delegation taunted their rivals with cries of, “Booze! Booze! Booze!” Anti-Klan forces threatened to bolt the party and support the Republican nominee in November.

In the final measure, the convention approved a so-called compromise measure that denounced intolerance generally, but avoided specific mention of the Klan. The vote was 543 3/20 in favor, 542 7/20 against. And the fun had only just started. For the next two weeks, the divided convention went through a record 103 ballots before it could agree on a presidential nominee. Madison Square Garden was packed with delegates, alternates, party apparatchiks, reporters and hangers-on. In these days before air conditioning was widely available, the Garden boiled over with summer heat and political intensity. Delegates from each side dripped with sweat as they went about the business or ripping the party to shreds. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans was on site to oversee personally the mayhem his movement had caused.

Finally, on the 103rd ballot, exasperated and desperate, the convention agreed on a compromise candidate, a lackluster federal judge named John W. Davis. Davis was a blank slate. He had no particular credentials recommending him for high office, and yet his low profile also made him an unobjectionable candidate to most of the war-weary Democrats still gathered inside the Garden. Exhausted and divided, the delegates left New York with the party in shambles. Davis went onto a stinging defeat at the hands of incumbent President Calvin Coolidge.

Four years later, with the Klan in a downward death spiral due largely to its own corruption and hypocrisy, Smith captured his party’s nomination. But millions of Protestant Democrats defected to the Republicans, resulting in another crushing defeat for the Democratic Party.

***

A lot changed between 1924, when Al Smith faced down the taunts and jeers of anti-Catholic Klan activists, and 1960, when John F. Kennedy won election as the country’s first Catholic president.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the experience of vanquishing the Nazi race state delegitimized bigotry in nearly all of its popular incarnations. During World War II, Americans became avid viewers of “platoon” films in which multi-ethnic military squads—almost always including a Jew, an Italian, an Irishman and a white Protestant (though almost never an African American)—worked together in common cause against Nazi fascism. By 1945, rhetoric that had been acceptable and normative in the political debates of the 1920s was simply no longer acceptable.

Ironically, immigration restriction itself also helped to temper the fires of anti-Catholicism. In 1924, America closed the door to mass immigration. With the steady in-stream of newcomers choked off, immigrant communities seemed gradually more acculturated to American norms and values, particularly as the American-born children of immigrants—yesteryear’s “anchor babies” —grew up, learned to speak English without foreign accents, and fought and died in World War II.

In the 1950s, American politicians embraced a soft form of religiosity as a bulwark against Soviet and communist aggression. Dwight Eisenhower famously remarked that “our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is” —a sentiment that underscored Cold War political consensus. Whereas in the 1930s, the demagogic “radio priest” Charles Coughlin deepened the chasm between Catholics and non-Catholics, by the 1950s, a new broadcast prelate, Fulton Sheen, earned the warm admiration of Jews and Protestants for his centrism.

In 1960, it was widely anticipated that JFK would face high obstacles to attaining the presidency. In truth, his Catholicism proved a low obstacle that he overcame with unexpected ease.

Francis’ visit comes at a time when immigration rates are at their highest since 1920. Today, over 13 percent of all Americans are immigrants, and at least another 5 percent are the American-born children of immigrants. Many of these newcomers (though certainly not all) are Catholics from Spanish-speaking countries. Like their Irish, German and Italian predecessors, they have quickly become workers, taxpayers, homeowners and voters. As was the case not long ago, their motives and fitness for citizenship have come under fire in the political theater.

The pope’s visit is a welcomed reminder that in an earlier era, political anti-Catholicism was tangled in a complex knot with racial and ethnic resentment. It was always impossible to separate one from the other. In this sense, to welcome Pope Francis to the United States without acknowledging the current backlash against Catholic immigrants is to embark on a perilous and untenable tightrope walk into history.

***

https://www.politico.com

Conference of Catholic Bishops Send Christmas Message to Cubans

"A country grows when among its different groups confrontation is not encouraged, but social friendship," says the text of the Bishops of Cuba

CUBANET

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2020 4:36 P.M.

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MIAMI, USA.- "It seems to us that all proposals should be heard and taken care of (...) A country grows when confrontation is not encouraged among its different groups, but social friendship," the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba (COCC) said this December 12 through a Christmas message, in which bishops expressed support for dialogue as a way to resolve differences among Cubans.

"Lack of dialogue," they said, quoting Pope Francis, implies that none, in the various sectors, are concerned about the common good, but about the acquisition of the benefits that power confers or, at best, to impose their thinking (...) True social dialogue implies the ability to respect each other's point of view (...). A dialogue not only from colleagues, but from friends to friends, from brothers to brothers, from Cubans to Cubans that we are all, from Cubans 'who speak understand each other' and thinking together we will be able to reach acceptable compromises".

The traditional Christmas message is addressed to priests, deaconos, religious life, lay people, to all Cubans "and to the whole world at times when we long to find the source of the true joy and hope that we all need to glimpse a better and safer future amid the difficulties we face."

Similarly, the bishops resumed their message of September 8, 2013, "which is particularly topical today," when they expressed, "by observing the reality we live in, by listening to and feeling in us the longings, hopes, and frustrations of God's children on this earth (...)", we reiterate that "any social project must open up spaces for citizens' personal and family life projects and must harmonize with each other."

In the misiva, the nine bishops and three signatory archbishops, including Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez, Archbishop of Havana, declared that they look "at a tired and overwhelmed people (...). Material deficiencies, spiritual fatigue, insufficient personal, family and national economics that severely affect present life and overshadow the future are weighing on the souls of the vast majority of Cubans. The existing economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences of natural phenomena cause fears and uncertainties on the population."

And because "Christmas continues to herald an important twist on history," Catholic bishops list some of the good news the Cuban people need:

"Good news for Cubans would be that the burden of getting food becomes a serene sharing of everyday bread as a family; (...) it would be that the announced readjustment of the national economy, far from raising the concerns of many, would help everyone to sustain their families with decent work, with sufficient pay and with the ever-needed social justice (...) would be to avoid violence, confrontation, insult and disqualification to create an atmosphere of social friendship and universal fraternity (...); intolerance would give way to healthy plurality, dialogue and negotiation among those with different opinions and criteria."

The communiqué of the Catholic bishops of Cuba is in addition to several voices who in recent weeks have criticized the Catholic Church's stance on the critical national reality, both as a result of the economic crisis and for the increase in repression and violations of the human rights of Cubans.

The COCC, the body of the Catholic Church that joins all the diocese and archdiocese of the country, ends its message by wishing for the multiplication of family love and harmony by 2021, as well as "a Christmas Eve as a family, a holy Christmas and a new year full of peace".

Cuban priest launches message to regime: "Our streets are everyone's"

The religious further argued that "society today needs the touch of love... that integrates and doesn't separate"

CUBANET

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2020 11:12 A.M.

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Sacerdote Maykel Gómez Hernández, Cuba — Priest Maykel Gómez Hernández (Photo: Facebook/New Word)

MIAMI, USA. – Cuban Catholic priest Maykel Gómez Hernández called for unity for all Cubans during a homily held on Friday in the Habanera church of San Juan Bosco.

In his words, Gómez Hernández assured that Cuba is above political leaders and positions and sent a message to those who proclaim that the streets are only revolutionary.

"We cannot, we do not have the right to say that our streets are for one or for another, our streets are of all, of all of us who were born here, let us be or not; of all of us who live here and love this land, the land of God, the land of our Lady of Charity of Copper. A land where God's love has been poured into our hearts, a land blessed by the Holy Spirit that moves all that we are," the religious argued during his alocution.

The religious further argued that "society today needs the touch of love... that integrates and doesn't separate."

Maykel Gómez Hernández stressed that it is not possible to advance in a climate of segregation and marginalization, a clear message to the campaigns launched by the Cuban regime against those who dissent from the political system established on the island.

"We cannot move forward if we continue to build walls that Christ once knocked down for you, we need to transform our hearts, we need to transform our thinking, and so it will be the only way to transform our society, a Christ-based society, based on love, understanding and solidarity among all," the priest added.

Over the past few months, several voices of the Cuban Catholic Church have draw attention to the situation in Cuba and criticized the ruling class's authority over citizens.

In October, Jorge Luis Pérez Soto, a priest from San Francisco de Paula Parish in Havana, assured during an ordinary time reading the rulers had to submit to the authorities of the people, and not the other way around.z

"Political authority is not above the people, it is due to the people who put it there," Pérez Soto said.

Days later, Father Alberto Reyes Piesof Esmeralda, in Camaguey, assured that on the island you live in slavery, a condition marked by the fact that "living without honor, without respect, without honor".

Priest Alberto Reyes calls on Cubans to act freely in the face of government impunity

'To do nothing, not to try to break impunity, is to collaborate with it,' says the parish priest.

Catholic priest Alberto Reyes Pías called on Cubans to act as "free men and women" to "truth and freedom make their way" on the island and end the impunity of the government.

"We have the power to act as free men and women, we have the power to say what we think, to use 'yes' and 'no' from our consciousness and not from the officially oriented, we can denounce in public and private what is wrong and not respond 'as if nothing happened', we have the power to join the one who defends truth and justice so as not to make him vulnerable," Reyes wrote on Facebook.

"Perhaps by joining us, saying what we think and claiming our rights, one by one, truth and freedom will make their way. To do nothing, not to try to break impunity, is to collaborate with it," he said.

Reyes expressed that the Cuban government remains in power not only for the pleasure of power itself and the economy, but also for impunity.

"It's not just about power and economy, because today that can be maintained without the need to have a people against it. It's something else, it's the impunity that gives absolute power, it's the possibility to act without being questioned (...) Impunity is the possibility of playing God."

The priest thus explained the impunity of the Cuban government: that is all that he has in response: "nothing happens".

-They sank the tugboat March 13,with children inside..., and nothing happened.

-Three young men who had hijacked a boat to leave the country were given the death penalty because an "exemplary condemnation" had to be given..., and nothing happened.

-The balsa crisis was caused,and people, in their desperation, were allowed to jump into the Florida Strait floating in tractor chambers..., and nothing happened.

-We don't come out of one economic crisis to get into another..., and nothing happens.

-Young people, the future of this homeland, continually emigrate..., and nothing happens.

-Professionals are used as cheap labor and deprived of the fruit of their work..., and nothing happens.

-A professional puts on social networks something that he has seen with his own eyes, but that implies a criticism of the situation that the country lives and is forever invalidated its title..., and nothing happens.

-A young university student expresses an opinion contrary to the system, and is expelled from the education system..., and nothing happens.

-State Security arbitrarily detains or confines people..., and nothing happens.

-The justice system is hijacked by the state, causing the legal helplessness of the ordinary citizen..., and nothing happens.

-Acts of repudiation are reactivated..., and nothing happens.

-Anyone is denigrated on television,lies about it, "weeds" and sells the desired profile, without there being any right or possibility of replica..., and nothing happens.

-Wages don't reach,and they're not going to reach..., and it's okay.

-There are no medicines essential for the health of many people..., and nothing happens.

-People who have worked all their lives come to old age and have nothing..., and nothing happens.

-Cuban daily life is an obstacle course to get what's necessary, from our daily bread to a bus ticket..., and nothing happens.

-Necessities begin to be sold in US dollars, the currency of the "Empire" to which the same ones that the shops put have blamed all our ills..., and nothing happens.

-A dictatorship is still called "Revolution", and nothing happens.

2021: with more freedom for Cuba

The priest noted that in 2021 Cubans expect to "be able to take to the streets and say out loud what we think without the fear that makes us lower our voices and act like the sparrow that 'stings and looks to the sides'".

"We expect streets full of happy people and not police officers ready to suppress the slightest 'slip', we hope to enjoy that rewarding sense of adult people, who fight together, to build a dignified present without the paternalistic guardianship of a state, which does not just understand that its role is not that of agent of totalitarian control, but that of helping citizens to be increasingly free and capable."

Several Cubans thanked Father Reyes' words. "God forbid the Cuban begins to become aware of what it means to continue collaborating with the executioner who has kidnapped his freedom," caroline Herr said.

"We pray a lot for you, Father Reyes. May God protect him and may the church at its highest levels support him" and "thank you for your dedication and dedication, for your courage to be able to tell the truth that our Cuba so desperately needs" are some of the comments.