{"id":2431,"date":"2005-09-14T08:38:41","date_gmt":"2005-09-14T08:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/che-at-the-vatican.html"},"modified":"2005-09-14T08:38:41","modified_gmt":"2005-09-14T08:38:41","slug":"che-at-the-vatican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/che-at-the-vatican.html","title":{"rendered":"Che at the Vatican"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magister on the new Cuban ambassador to the Vatican. The Archbishop of Havana is not pleased.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Roa Kour\u00ed, 69, is a prominent figure in the Cuban "nomenklatura." He is the son of one of the intellectuals closest to Castro during the revolution, Ra\u00fal Roa Garcia. He was an extremely close friend of Ernesto Che Guevara, and still has a great admiration for him. In the volume of memoirs he published recently, "En el Torrente," he recounts the many protagonists of the history of the second half of the 20th century \u2013 Mao and Eisenhower, Nehru and Kruschev, Nasser and John XXIII \u2013 with whom he dealt during his diplomatic career. <\/p>\n

But now, at the crowning moment of his career with his prestigious post in Rome, Roa Kour\u00ed has sparked a genuine uproar within the Cuban bishops’ conference, of which cardinal Ortega is president. <\/p>\n

The Cuban ambassador gave the interview to the Rome news agency ASCA, which released it on September 3. In it, after paying homage to the legend of Che Guevara and extolling the virtues of Castro’s revolution, Roa Kour\u00ed paints a portrait of the Catholic Church in Cuba in which the bishops are always the bad guys, except in a few cases, while the good guys are the priests and the people, again with a few exceptions. Being a bad guy means siding with the United States and the expatriates in Miami. And being a good guy means siding with Castro’s revolution. What about the Vatican? They’re with the good guys, according to Roa Kour\u00ed. Therefore, they are against the bishops. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magister on the new Cuban ambassador to the Vatican. The Archbishop of Havana is not pleased. Roa Kour\u00ed, 69, is a prominent figure in the Cuban "nomenklatura." He is the son of one of the intellectuals closest to Castro during the revolution, Ra\u00fal Roa Garcia. He was an extremely close friend of Ernesto Che Guevara,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nChe at the Vatican - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/che-at-the-vatican.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Che at the Vatican - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Magister on the new Cuban ambassador to the Vatican. The Archbishop of Havana is not pleased. Roa Kour\u00ed, 69, is a prominent figure in the Cuban "nomenklatura." He is the son of one of the intellectuals closest to Castro during the revolution, Ra\u00fal Roa Garcia. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}