Cuba Marian pilgrimage ends with call for reconciliation

(December 31.12.2011) Roman Catholic Church leaders called for reconciliation among Cubans and urged further economic reform, at an outdoor mass in Cuba on Friday marking the end of a national pilgrimage of a statue of the island's patron saint. About 3,000 people gathered along Havana Bay for the ceremony led by Havana Cardinal Jaime Ortega paying tribute to the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, a Catholic icon that has toured the communist-ruled country, for the past 16 months in the first such religious display permitted since the 1950s. Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit Cuba in the spring to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the statue, said to have been found floating in a bay by three fishermen in eastern Cuba. Cardinal Ortega said millions of Cubans had prayed before the small, ornate statue, which was taken around the country in a specially outfitted Toyota pickup truck that looked a little like the Popemobile used when the pope tours. "Our people appreciate peace as a superior good and have prayed much asking the Virgin of Charity that it include reconciliation," he told the crowd. "Mother, come again over the sometimes agitated waves of our history, and with your mantle, that the waters can never dampen, cover all the Cubans, also those that live outside of Cuba," he said. The point was reinforced by the presence of Thomas Wenski, archbishop of Miami, the center of the nearly 2 million-strong Cuban exile community that fled the island after the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro in power and has led U.S. opposition to the Cuban government. Wenski sat on the makeshift altar with Ortega and all the bishops of the Cuban Church. "I think today the Virgin of Charity has brought together the Cuban people, " Wenski told reporters.