Pope Mass in Cuba: Celebrating Mary

Pope Benedict XVI has celebrated mass to mark the feast of the Annunciation. The Pope presided over the celebration in front of thousands of the faithful in Maceo Square in Santiago de Cuba. Our correspondent Philippa Hitchen who is travelling with the Pope, reports . Listen
Nothing is impossible for God: those words from St Luke’s Gospel of the angel Gabriel to Mary, as she learns that God has chosen her to be the mother of His son, rang out as the sun set across the central square in Santiago de Cuba where Pope Benedict celebrated Mass on Monday marking the feast of the Annunciation.
Mary, the Pope explained in his homily, occupies a central place in the great mystery of the Incarnation at the heart of our Christian faith. She also occupies a central place in the life of the Church in Cuba which has been celebrating a Jubilee year for the 400^th anniversary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, an ancient wooden statue which was found floating in the sea off the northern coast of the island by three local fishermen. Normally the precious image is kept in a shrine which the Pope visits on Tuesday morning, but for the whole of the past year it has been travelling on pilgrimage around the towns and villages of this island nation, drawing unexpectedly large crowds and reinforcing the public face of the Church in this staunchly communist country.
The main reason for this papal pilgrimage to Cuba is to symbolically close this Jubilee year, thus the 60 cm high statue of Our Lady with a golden mantle was brought in a glass case on an open top car to the Mass, making her own tour of ecstatic crowds before the Pope mobile followed close behind.
Despite a lone protester shouting anti-government slogans at the start of the Mass, there were few signs of the tensions that continue to characterise Church – state relations in this country, a problem the Pope referred to in his meeting with President Raul Castro at the airport earlier in the day. But in his homily he spoke of the ‘effort, daring and self-sacrifice’ that people here face every day as they struggle to build a more open and inclusive society – a goal which many here are hoping that this papal visit to Cuba will help to encourage.