Year: 2020

For Mon. Juan de Dios Hernández Ruíz, bishop of Pinar del Río, the virus that appeared in China a few months ago caused life to take on another rhythm. In tune with the popular saying that says, “If you want to see God laugh, show him your plans,” the Church in Vueltabajo had to adapt her life to a time of pandemic. However, as it quotes from a recently published book, peace in the midst of a pandemic is found only in Jesus. “The question for all of us, he says, is this: are we going to trust Him?”

While September brings for believers, and for Cubans proud of their traditions, the celebrations associated with the Virgin of Charity of Copper, politics pokes out its hairy ear. Again, ideological stances, and more than these, hatred and the desire to separate and prevail, seek to meddle and soil issues where such attitudes and feelings should not be accommodated. How can some pretend that a sacred symbol, like that Mother of all, serves to sustain or to hate and oppose a political system? Charity, without exclusions, is everyone’s. No side has the right to politicize a celebration that rightly calls for harmony, peace, unity and not hatred. There are too many misfortunes right now, just because of the policies, hatreds and selfishness on the sides of the world, so that also the premises of peace and union are soiled with ideological mudslides.

It is in the vocational dimension of his life that the seminarian Juan Carlos Pañellas has felt the effects of this time. It is in her that she has had the most positive experiences and where she has suffered most from some realities that make her think a lot about her priestly future. While from Holy Week to today he has been able to bring communions to several people every Sunday (something that makes him very happy), seeing closed temples and under-neglected people in such difficult times has made him reflect, feel the human frailty, and see the contradiction of the ecclesial discourses to be amended.