By Ignacio Estrada
Havana, Cuba. While the Catholic Church stumbles before the growing number of child abuse scandals, the Cuban clergy seems immune to this epidemic.
The fact is that so far this Pandora’s Box has not been opened on the island. I don’t think that’s a reason to think that events like this could not have happened on our land. We would only have to dig and put our ears to the ground to hear the rumors of our grandmothers and grandfathers or even ourselves a little more what happens when we serve at mass.
With my note I don’t mean to accuse any priest or religious but if I pushed the drops would begin to fall. I am convinced that at some point someone started to talk and others thought about how, like in other countries, what the church can give in exchange for their silence.
That’s if the Cuban government, shrewd and cautious like always in its communications between church and state doesn’t think to collect evidence or those small and insignificant anomalies and ask for favors in return or better yet ask for the complicity of the Church and the Cuban Catholic hierarchy.
I know a large number of priests and religious of both sexes and I know some people like the opposite sex and some have occasional and spontaneous relationships but the largest number of these I know are gay.
As a Catholic, as a homosexual and as a Cuban I am going to be talking and this is the ground I stand on. I know cases like these exist and I simply try with my note to call attention to this abomination.
No matter what we are, nor the preferences we have, child abuse must end now. The Cuban and Universal Church should immediately receive an injection of renewal and delouse faults like these, that exonerate those who have not committed these offenses and sit on the bench next to those who have committed them but remain the silent.
I know that those who answer the call of vocation never cease to be men and women, I understand human matter and we are not ones to criticize. The fact that acts like these are committed should not because we, as the faithful, justify our one. On the contrary, we must fix on the true teaching of Jesus Christ.
To allow God that is really our Cuban church is far from any scandal like this. To allow God to enthrone the new Pope with the name of Francis I comes to repair our church and tidy up our home.
22 April 2013
