by FRANCIS X. ROCCA
ABOARD THE PAPAL FLIGHT TO MEXICO (CNS) — En route to Latin America for his second papal visit to the region, Pope Benedict XVI called for patience with the Catholic Church’s effort to promote freedom in communist Cuba, and criticised Catholics who participate in illegal drug trade or who ignore their moral responsibilities to seek social justice.
The Pope, flying to Mexico on March 23, followed his usual practice of taking a few preselected questions from reporters on the papal plane.
Responding to a question about human rights in Cuba, where he was to arrive on March 26, and where opposition leaders have been arrested after publicly appealing for a meeting with him, Pope Benedict said that the “Church is always on the side of freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion”.
“Marxist ideology as it was conceived no longer responds to the truth today, we can no longer respond this way to construct a society,” the Pope said.
But he said that the “path of collaboration and constructive dialogue,” which his predecessor Blessed John Paul II initiated with the communist regime, “is long and demands patience”.
“We want to help in the spirit of dialogue to avoid the trauma and to help move toward a fraternal and just society” in Cuba, he said.
In answer to a question about dramatic inequalities of wealth in Latin America, Pope Benedict referred to a widespread moral “schizophrenia”.
“We see in Latin America and elsewhere that not a few Catholics have a certain schizophrenia with regard to individual and public morality,” he said. “In their private lives they are Catholics, believers, but in public life they follow other paths that don’t respond to the great values necessary for the foundation of a just society.”
Although that assessment might have seemed to echo leftwing critiques of the oligarchies that dominate the politics and economies of many countries in the region, the Pope declined a reporter’s invitation to endorse even a non-Marxist, non-violent version of liberation theology, a movement that he severely criticised as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office in the 1980s and ’90s.
“The Church is not a political power, it is not a party,” the Pope said. “It is a moral reality, a moral power.”
Accordingly, he said, “the first job of the Church is to educate consciences … both in individual ethics and public ethics.”
He called for promoting Catholic social teaching even to non-believers by an appeal to a “common rationality” that he said could overcome social divisions.
To a reporter from Mexico, who said the fighting among traffickers has killed an estimated 50,000 people over the past five years, Pope Benedict said the Church has a responsibility to “unmask evil, unmask the idolatry of money that enslaves man” as well as the “false promises, the lie, the swindle that lie behind drugs”.
“We must see that man has need of the infinite,” the Pope said. “To make present the goodness of God, make present his truth, the true infinite for which we thirst, is the great duty of the Church.”