Pope Francis Meets Castro Brothers, Church’s Revolutionary Foes

“Francis has come to bless this new union between Cuba and the United States“, said Enrique Mesa, a 32-year-old tourism worker.

Pope Francis marked a personal anniversary Monday – the day he decided as a teenager to become a priest – by traveling to the Cuban city of Holguin.

“As we all know, this visit from Pope Francis comes in the context of his role in the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement process, and obviously to reach normalization relations with Cuba it will be a long and complex role”, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, a career member of the foreign service and charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy to Cuba, told pilgrims from the archdioceses of Boston and Miami during an evening reception September 20.

A priest places a skullcap on Pope Francis during Mass at…

The government of President Raul Castro, who attended the Holguin Mass, had hoped the 78-year-old Francis would explicitly condemn the still-intact US economic embargo against Cuba before leaving on Tuesday for Washington.

But the Church nevertheless faces numerous struggles in Cuba.

It struggles to recruit clergy in a country of 11 million people where only 10 percent of the population describes itself as Catholic.

Lombardi said the central themes for the pope’s visit would be the fractious conflicts tearing apart the Middle East and elsewhere, migration and the need to help those who flee their homes, and the importance of dialogue in building bridges.

Holguin, Cuba’s fourth-largest city, is the capital of Holguin province, where the Castro brothers were born to a wealthy Spanish sugar cane farmer and a Cuban mother, in the small rural hamlet of Biran. He visited a leprosy center and met with religious leaders, and he celebrated Mass in the cities of Santa Clara, Camaguey, Santiago and Havana.

On Tuesday, he will fly to the US and finish his historic 10-day tour of the two countries.

Leiva and Roque say security agents explicitly told them they couldn’t go to the pope’s services in Cuba.

On arriving Saturday Francis asked Raul to convey his “sentiments of particular respect and consideration” to Fidel.

In his homily delivered under the gaze of a metal portrait of revolutionary fighter Che Guevara, Francis urged Cubans to care for one another out of a sense of service, not ideology.

According to the Vatican’s spokesperson Federico Lombardi, the meeting had a different tone than one in 2012 between Castro and Pope Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict.