Cuban Church confirms Pope to visit in spring

(December, 09, 2011) A senior Roman Catholic Church official said on Thursday that Pope Benedict XVI will visit the Caribbean nation this spring. The exact date of the trip, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Cuba's patron saint, is expected to be announced in the Vatican on Monday, according to Monsignor Jose Felix Perez, executive secretary of the Cuban Catholic Bishops Conference. This would be the first trip by a pontiff since Blessed John Paul II's historic pastoral visit in 1998. “It will be a moment for energizing the faith in Cuba. It will give strength and vigour to the faith in Cuba,'' Msgr. Perez said. “The visit should be one of peace and reconciliation,” he said. Cuba's Church has played an increasingly important role in Cuba in recent years, helping negotiate the release of political prisoners in 2009 and 2010, and even consulting with President Raul Castro and his advisers on free-market changes he is pushing to save the island's economy from ruin. Vatican’s spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi had announced earlier on Nov. 10 that the Pope was considering the possibility of a visit to Mexico and Cuba next spring, but nothing had been fixed then. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, as Fidel Castro increasingly embraced Marxism and the Soviet Union, anti-clerical actions increased. But since the end of the Cold War relations with the Church began improving culminating in Pope John Paul’s 1998 visit. The pontiff celebrated a mass at a packed Revolution Square, calling for ``Cuba to open to the world, and the world to open to Cuba.''