Cuban Catholic Church hopes
for papal visit in 2012
HAVANA, June 18 (AP) - A Cuban Roman Catholic bishop says Church leaders on the island hope Pope Benedict XVI can visit the country in 2012.
Emilio Aranguren is bishop of the eastern province of Holguin. He told reporters Thursday that it is the Church's "hope, our interest, that the pope can come to Cuba in the year 2012."
He said such a visit would coincide with the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the image of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, Cuba's patron saint.
It would be the first papal trip to the communist-run island since John Paul II's historic 1998 Cuba visit.
But, Aranguren noted, "It's up to the Holy See."
[One imagines it could be done during a Latin American trip, since other than the trip to Brazil, the Pope has yet to return to a region that is home to more than half the world's Catholics.]
The Virgen del Cobre*, formally Nuestra Senora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre), is enshrined in Cuba's only Basilica, located near Santiago de Cuba (nearest city to Guantanamo). The copper mining town of El Cobre is in the Sierra Maestra mountain range where Cuban guerrillas under Fidel Castro prepared to march on Havana and eventually deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista.
*
The 16-inch clay statue was found in the sea after a storm by three Cuban fisherman in 1610. The Virgin of El Cobre was declared Patroness of Cuba by Benedict XV in 1916. John Paul II visited the Basilica in 1998.