In the first public Mass in Cuba for almost 40 years, the Pope said yesterday no ideology could replace God's wisdom and criticised the government for its policies on abortion and education.
In a country where there are six abortions for every 10 births, he described it as "an abominable crime, a senseless impoverishment of the person and of society." He called on the Cuban people to "open your families and schools to the values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ". Only the State is allowed run schools in Cuba and religion is not taught in them.
At a Mass attended by about 50,000 people in the city of Santa Clara, he said the family unit experiences crisis "when married couples live in economic or cultural systems which, under the guise of freedom and progress, promote or defend an anti-birth mentality".
This, he said, induced couples to regulate their fertility in ways which were incompatible with human dignity. "There is even," he said, "an acceptance of abortion, which is always, in addition to being an abominable crime, a senseless impoverishment of the person and of society itself".
In such societies too, he said, motherhood was sometimes presented as something backward or as a limitation of a woman's freedom, which distorted its true nature and dignity; and children were presented, not as a great gift of God, but rather as something to be defended against.
He said the social situation in Cuba had created "not a few difficulties for family stability". These he instanced as the scarcity of material resources, "as when wages are not sufficient or have a very limited buying-power", dissatisfaction for ideological reasons, and the attraction of the consumer society. All had led to emigration, he said, "which has torn apart families and caused suffering for a large part of the population".
As difficult to accept and as traumatic, he said, was the separation of children from their families and the substitution of the role of parents "as a result of schooling away from home, even during adolescence". He said this exposed children to the dangers of "promiscuous behaviour, loss of ethical values, coarseness, premarital sexual relations at an early age and recourse to abortion."
The path to overcoming these evils was Jesus Christ, he said. "No ideology can replace his influence and power." That was why there was a need to recover religious values and to encourage the virtues which shaped the origins of the Cuban nation. "The family, the school and the church must form an educational community in which the children of Cuba can `grow to humanity'," he said, quoting the Cuban patriot , Jose Marti. To applause, he told the crowd: "Do not be afraid: open your families and schools to the values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which are never a threat to any social project."
On marriage, he said: "If the human person is the centre of every social institution" then the family must be "a community of free and responsible persons who live marriage as a project of love."
Parents must be acknowledged as "the first and foremost educators of their children", since they had conferred life on their children.