Church-State relations

The always-thorny issue about the level of “engagement” between the Catholic Church hierarchy in Cuba and the Castro regime has risen again.

This time, it’s a commentary published by Commonweal, the New York based Catholic magazine.

According to one of the magazine’s high-profile contributors, Eduardo Peñalver, an associate professor at Cornell Law School, both the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy on the island have been far too accommodating when it comes to the Castro brothers.

“The Church has been so eager to avoid persecution in Cuba that it has bent over backwards in recent years to avoid confrontation with the Castro government and has distanced itself from dissident groups on the island,” Professor Peñalver writes.

“Here we have a fairly doctrinaire communist regime - a regime whose policies clearly contradict the Church's teachings on the inhumanity of communism - and the Church's stance is one of accommodation.”

Strong words, which you can read here.