{"id":6419,"date":"2006-08-20T12:09:08","date_gmt":"2006-08-20T12:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/praying-for-castro.html"},"modified":"2006-08-20T12:09:08","modified_gmt":"2006-08-20T12:09:08","slug":"praying-for-castro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/praying-for-castro.html","title":{"rendered":"Praying for Castro"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former political prisoner Armando Valladares slams Cuba’s bishops:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The Cuban Catholic Bishops Conference (COCC in Spanish) that now urges the faithful to pray for the health of the Red Wolf, has never publicly dared ask for prayers for their decimated flock, including the thousands of political prisoners agonizing in Castro\u2019s prisons and all those unjustly condemned and executed.<\/p>\n

Trustworthy witnesses in Cuba say an unprecedented tension among the people and a heavy silence filled with expectation has taken over the streets; it is a silence so tangible it could be cut with a knife.<\/p>\n

Some even go as far as to say that all it would take is the cry, \u2018the wolf is naked,\u2019 to unleash upheavals like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Ceaucescu\u2019s bloody dictatorship in Rumania. <\/p>\n

The shepherds chose precisely this critical juncture to sound the alert to prevent "internal events" from disturbing the artificial and fraudulent "peace" which in Cuba is nothing but the fatal peace that follows the firing squad.<\/p>\n

Once again the shepherds shield the wolf rather than come to the defense of their own flock.<\/p>\n

The next day, the Cuban Bishops\u2019 communiqu\u00e9 was echoed by none other than the Cardinal Primate of the Americas and Archbishop of Santo Domingo, Msgr. Nicolas Lopez Rodriguez. He not only called on the Dominican people to pray "for the health" of the tyrant but branded as "inhuman" the legitimate hopes of the Cuban exiles who went to the streets of Miami to express their hope that the physical deterioration of Castro might bring a prompt liberation of the island. (Cf. Listin Diario Digital and La Plana Digital<\/em>, Dominican Republic, August 4 & 5, 2006).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Related: a Miami Herald article about how Protestant and Catholic groups in the US are preparing for any greater freedom that might result from a power transition. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former political prisoner Armando Valladares slams Cuba’s bishops: The Cuban Catholic Bishops Conference (COCC in Spanish) that now urges the faithful to pray for the health of the Red Wolf, has never publicly dared ask for prayers for their decimated flock, including the thousands of political prisoners agonizing in Castro\u2019s prisons and all those unjustly…<\/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-6419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPraying for Castro - 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\/2006\/08\/praying-for-castro.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Praying for Castro - 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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\/6419","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=6419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}