By TIM GOLDEN
HAVANA -- In cramped living rooms and quiet backyards across
this Communist-ruled island, Catholic faithful and curious
newcomers are
gathering to discuss the Bible, debate values, and talk a
bit more openly
about Cuba's future.
Parish priests
say baptisms of adults are on the rise. Catechism classes
are enrolling
new children. In Havana, the newest addition to the tiny
corps of native-born
priests was ordained the other day at a triumphal
Mass in the
somber stone cathedral.
Yet such signs
of a new vitality in church life do not obscure the
disappointment
and frustration that have been growing among Roman
Catholics here
since Pope John Paul II visited last January.
The Government
of President Fidel Castro, which won praise for
receiving the
Pope, broadcasting his often-critical messages and releasing
scores of prisoners
at his behest, has shown little new flexibility since then
in response
to church requests for greater freedom.
Efforts to ease
the admittance of foreign priests and nuns have made no
apparent progress.
Nor have pleas that the Government scale back
controls on
Catholic social service agencies that could deliver badly
needed food
and medical aid from abroad.
Permits for religious
processions have been denied as often as they have
been granted,
church officials said, and hopes that the Pope's visit might
open space for
religious groups in the state-controlled news media have
mostly been
dashed. Approval of longstanding requests -- to allow the
opening of Catholic
schools or importation of an offset press to print
newsletters
and magazines -- seems as distant as it did in years past.
"Religious people
in general are feeling a greater sense of freedom than
they did before
the Pope came," said Orlando Márquez, a spokesman for
the Archbishop
of Havana, Jaime Cardinal Ortega. But he quickly added:
"It is obvious
that there is still a lack of understanding by the authorities of
the role that
the church should have in society. There are still limitations
that are unnecessary."
Both Government
and church officials emphasize that the months they
spent preparing
for and staging the Pope's five-day visit left a legacy of
better communication
between them.
Problems that
might have flared into small crises in the past, they say,
have been handled
with discretion and dispatch.
When a medical
emergency required a bishop to travel suddenly to the
United States
on a recent weekend, the authorities arranged an exit visa
immediately.
When Communist Party officials lost patience with what they
considered the
inappropriately "political" activities of an American-born
priest in the
central province of Villa Clara, church officials reluctantly
agreed to bring
him back to Havana to avoid his expulsion. (Church
officials said
the priest, the Rev. Patrick Sullivan, refused to be reassigned
and opted to
leave the country.)
"A working relationship
has been established between the Bishops'
Conference and
the Cuban Government which I think will be very
significant
for the future," said Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston, a close
observer of
the Cuban Church.
"The climate
of church-state relations is better," Cardinal Law added in a
telephone interview.
"But what good
is the climate if other things don't happen? You can't just
celebrate climate
forever."
By prevailing
Latin American standards, the Catholic Church in Cuba
remains so small
and cautious as to seem almost politically insignificant.
Though nearly
half of Cuba's 11 million people have been baptized and
the church claims
roughly 70 percent of the population as Catholic, most
analysts estimate
the practicing faithful at a fraction of those numbers.
Over the last
decade, various Protestant congregations and the
Afro-Cuban faith
called Santeria have grown more quickly.
With the Pope
by his side in January, the Archbishop of the eastern city of
Santiago de
Cuba, Pedro Meurice Estiu, squarely blamed "an ideological
confrontation
with Marxism-Leninism induced by the state" for the
embattled state
of the church.
But such defiance
has scarcely echoed since John Paul's departure. A
more typical
tone was that struck by the Rev. Manuel Uñe as he led a
visitor through
the classrooms he was building in the basement of his
Church of San
Juan de Letrán in Havana. "The process has to be a
gradual one,"
he said. "Changes must be prepared for."
Still, the challenge
the Catholic Church could potentially pose to the
Communist Party
has come into sharper relief even as the Government
has reasserted
its control.
Answering the
Pope's call for Catholics to "participate in the public
debate," a fledgling
Catholic Workers' Movement recently began
advertising
its plan to hold a workshop in Havana with the audacious title,
"Women: Democracy
and Participation."
Other Catholic
groups have sprouted to organize farmers and
professionals
and to deal with human rights issues and problems of the
elderly. A small
but growing number of discussion groups have slowly
begun to erode
the longstanding ban on any non-Communist public airing
of political
themes.
Neither Santeria
worshipers nor Cuba's Protestant sects have developed
any national
structures to speak of. Meanwhile, virtually every church in
Cuba has been
busy mapping out its parish with the sort of grid that might
look vaguely
familiar to social activists in the United States.
Over the coming
months, as they did before the Pope's arrival, young
Catholics will
go door-to-door, handing out copies of the Gospels and
inviting new
visitors to their church.
"To a certain
degree, the church is taking up space that in another society
might be occupied
by political parties, labor unions and human rights
groups," said
Enrique López Oliva, a historian at the University of Havana
who studies
religious issues. "Even with all the difficulties it has, the church
has emerged
as the most important interlocutor between the society and
the Government.
The senior Communist
Party official for religious affairs, Caridad Diego,
appeared to
be of two minds about the possible dangers of a
reinvigorated
church.
In an interview
at her Central Committee offices, she dismissed the notion
that the Catholic
hierarchy might pose any real political threat to the
Government.
"I do not believe that the church has any interest in trying to
change the role
that it has," she said.
At the same time,
Ms. Diego indicated that the improving church-state
relationship
would not make the Government any less vigilant toward
those it sees
as potential transgressors.
She acknowledged,
for example, that Father Sullivan had angered party
officials by
giving sanctuary to "tiny counterrevolutionary groups" that she
declined to
identify and "going beyond his role as a priest."
Several church
officials said the priest's main offenses appeared to have
been to preach
emphatically about his parishioners' duty to assert their
rights and to
post copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
around his church.
"This is the
church that some people in your Government are trying to
use," she said,
referring to proposals by conservative Republicans in the
United States
to adopt the Catholic Church as a conduit for aid to
Castro's enemies
-- plans the church itself has rejected. "We are a
country at war.
And there are people who sometimes take advantage of
the good will
of the churches."
Ms. Diego also
suggested there were distinctions to be drawn among the
various church
petitions pending before the Government, several of which
were pointedly
reiterated by the Pope when he received Cuba's 13
bishops at the
Vatican in June.
While the establishment
of Catholic schools is out of the question, she
indicated, the
possibility of easier accreditation for the roughly 130 foreign
priests and
nuns awaiting visas "is not a closed issue."
Similarly, although
officials have stiffly rejected church appeals for access
to the official
media, Ms. Diego recently traveled to Boston at Cardinal
Law's invitation
to observe how Catholic social service agencies there
operate. It
was the first visit to the United States by a senior Cuban
official outside
the normal diplomatic routine in memory.
[During celebrations
the week of Sept. 6 for the island's patron saint, Our
Lady of Charity
of El Cobre, the authorities displayed both a measure of
greater openness
and a renewal of traditional controls.
[For the first
time since the Pope's departure, the Government allowed a
radio broadcast
by the church, a 15-minute message about the Virgin of
Charity by Cardinal
Ortega.
An hour later,
thousands of faithful were allowed to walk a dozen blocks
through downtown
Havana behind a gilded icon of the Virgin, and other,
smaller processions
were authorized in two provinces.
[But while the
Havana procession was going on, human rights activists
said, about
20 Catholic activists were prevented from joining it by
plainclothes
police agents. Two people were reportedly detained after a
Mass at which
they held up signs against abortion and the death penalty,
and in a sweep
over the two days leading up to the celebration at least 14
dissidents were
arrested and briefly held, the activists said.]
Several church
officials said that if the Government chose to make their
lives easier,
it could find innumerable places to start.
One noted for
example that Cardinal Ortega, as a Cuban citizen, could
not rent a cellular
telephone and must use one rented in the name of a
Spanish nun.
Some clerics
and academic analysts believe the ability of the church to
flourish may
depend less on the state than on its own ability to draw in the
disparate groups
that began knocking on church doors over the last
decade. Older
churchgoers who have remained stalwart throughout the
revolution now
mix at Sunday Mass with middle-aged Catholics who
have trickled
back and young people who describe lives that sound, by
and large, worlds
away from the ideals that John Paul upheld during his
trip. "Many
of these youths come from a world in which Marxist ideology
has eroded ethical
values," said the Rev. José Félix Pérez, secretary
to the
Cuban Bishops'
Conference. "There is an important challenge there."
It remains to
be seen, for instance how the Cuban Church's closeness to
Rome might be
reconciled with an appeal to young citizens of a world
where marriage
is often seen as a way to get a better apartment,
extramarital
sex is a main pastime, and 40 percent of pregnancies are
estimated to
end in abortion.
"They say that
people always get more religious when they start to hear
thunder," said
Osmar Barbán, 40, a former party member who stopped in
to pray the
other day at the Church of Our Lady of Regla on the edge of
Havana's harbor.
"Well, people here have many hardships. And since the
Pope came, things
with the church have been a little more open."