Believe in the Good News

By Catholic Bishops of Cuba

1. “Believe in the Good News” (Mk 1:15) is the invitation that Jesus makes to men at the beginning of his mission on our earth. Given the proximity of the Kingdom of God, which Jesus incarnates and brings to us, the call that He makes to us is to believe, that is, to receive with faith the Good News that Jesus himself is. Indeed, Jesus is the Eternal Son of God who became man in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Being God as his Father, he communicates the life and truth of God to us. Being a man like us makes them accessible and familiar to us. In the Person of Jesus we see everything that God is and does for us. He himself said: “No one goes to the Father except through Me (…) He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (Jn 14, 6. 9).

2. 30 years ago, the bishops of that time published a message titled “Love Hopes All” and 20 years later, another with the title “Hope Does Not Disappoint.” It would be useful to read them again in the current context to rediscover the validity of so many analyzes and proposals that they contain. However, for us Christians, love and hope are not primarily human dispositions or feelings, but rather come from faith and, together with it, are received as gifts from God. Hope is the daughter and sister of faith. Love is the fullest fruit of both. Without faith, hope is weak and love is precarious. The experience and testimony of faith, hope and love can be defined as the life and identity of the Christian.

Faith unites us to Christ and gives us new life
3. The author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us that “Faith is the guarantee of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). Saint Mark, in his Gospel, presents faith to us as the human response to the person of Jesus and his proposals. Those who approach Jesus and express their humble and trusting faith are transformed, experience healing, are filled with joy and give glory to God.
4. The Catholic bishops of Cuba want to make this invitation of Jesus to believe in Him, to accept his person and his teachings resonate for this people, also today. Receiving Christ and letting Him change us helps us heal our hearts, fills us with His life and love, and allows us to look at the world with hope. Thus our people, transformed by Him, will always more renew our families, our daily relationships, our way of being a people.
5. True faith makes the disciple of Christ end up living with and like Christ, which translates into looking at others, serving, forgiving, smiling, caressing, suffering, giving one’s life and loving in the style of Jesus.

6. We address the Cubans baptized in the faith of the Church, but also those who, without being baptized, believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and who please frequent our temples to request the baptism of their children, pray for their deceased or participate in the celebration of the feast of a saint or those significant days that mark the life of the Church.

7. Our greeting now also goes to adolescents, young people or adults, who have recently approached the Church and have asked for baptism, or have made their first communion or confirmation, or are preparing to access any of these sacraments. . Our special congratulations to those who have celebrated their marriage before the Lord or are training for it. Let yourselves be renewed by Jesus Christ! Don’t be afraid to live a coherent faith! In prayer and the sacraments you will find the strength to be faithful! In the Christian community they will find a new family where they will experience the joy of believing! Have the courage to be like Christ Jesus!

8. We thank all those who have transmitted and cared for the faith of the people, even in the midst of persecution and rejection. We now think of parents, grandparents, catechists, missionaries, visitors to the sick, those responsible for some Caritas service, teachers in our training centers, permanent deacons, religious men and women, seminarians and priests. Likewise, we carry in our hearts all those who, in the past, gave so much for the Church and for Cuba, and today are far from the community for various reasons, those who reside in other parts of the world and especially those who Now they are sick at home or housed in nursing homes, unable to go to Mass, but offering their crosses for evangelization, for the good of families, for the Pope and the Church, for priestly and religious vocations, for the material and spiritual progress of Cuba. To those who announce Jesus Christ to the people every day, with their testimony, with their prayers, with their offerings and with their word, all the gratitude, recognition and affection of their bishops. Don’t get tired of bearing witness to your faith!

Faith helps to live each event with the Presence of Christ

9. Jesus Christ tells us: “I have come so that they may have Life, and have it in abundance” (Jn 10:10). He, with his redeeming death and his glorious resurrection, and with the sending of the Holy Spirit has destroyed the power of death and evil. And by uniting us to Him through baptism, He has given us His abundant life.

10. In multiple passages of the Gospel, faith is shown as helping to live a fuller and happier life. When Jesus restores sight to the blind, he tells us that faith is light that makes us see the world and our own realities in a new and clear way (cf. Mt 20, 29-34; Lk 18, 35-43). Jesus’ encounters with paralytics, cripples and lame people tell us that faith is the strength that enables us to walk, to walk through life with new spirits (cf. Lk 5, 17-26; Jn 5, 1-18; Acts 3 , 1-5). Faith is also a power that heals the deepest part of the person and expels from the human heart the consequences of sin, sadness and discouragement. (cf. Lc 8, 26-39)

11.The lack or absence of faith closes the doors to God’s work and hinders his revitalizing and healing action. One day they brought to Jesus a sick child, an only son, who his disciples were unable to cure. And Jesus pronounced a very strong and disconcerting word: “What an incredulous and perverse generation! How long will I have to be with you and endure you?” (Lc. 9. 41). And on another occasion, on the contrary, he told us: “Have faith in God. I assure you that if one, without doubting in his heart, but believing that what he says will be fulfilled, orders that mountain to be removed from there and thrown into the sea, he will succeed.” (Mc 11,22).

12. Faith helps us discover the meaning and how to face those strong, contradictory and even antagonistic situations that arise in everyday life.

13. Through faith, the disciple of Christ learns to lovingly assume all those difficult and adverse realities that we have to face daily. It is faith that prevents us from losing hope for a better tomorrow despite all the difficulties so present among us, associated with the scarcity of material goods and other social evils, increased in what we are experiencing. It is faith in Christ that will allow us today, despite the emigration of our loved ones, the increase in poverty, social deterioration and so much suffering, to live confident that the future will be bright, because the future of man It is Christ and Christ is the Light of the world.

14. Faith in God leads us to live on this earth as pilgrims, walkers with hope, working for a better world, but with our eyes set on heaven, on eternal life. When Jesus arrived at the place where his great friend Lazarus had been buried, he said: “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in Me, even if he dies, will live; and he who is alive and believes in Me will not die forever” (Jn 11, 25). The announcement that Christ has risen is the core of faith in Him. To believe in Jesus Christ is to believe that He is alive, he accompanies us in every moment of our life, he communicates his life to us in the sacraments of the Church; He is present among us, especially in the weakest and most needy (cf. Mt 25, 31ff) and awaits us in the Father’s house, where He has already gone to prepare a place for us (cf. Jn 14, 1-4).

15. By this faith we take comfort in celebrating Mass and praying for the souls of our deceased. With these supplications, we thank God for the good they did and offer the saving sacrifice of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. We are encouraged by the hope of finding ourselves again in the home of Heaven.

16. In the Creed, a compendium of our faith, we announce: “I believe in the communion of saints.” Saints are those Christians who, through their life of faith, hope and charity, are in communion with the Risen Christ. Those who have already died and who the Church recognizes are in heaven, accompany us with their prayers and example. They tell us that the ideal of holiness is possible, as long as we allow ourselves to be transformed by the grace of God.

17. We bishops see with pleasure the devotion of you, people of God, to the Most Holy Mary and to so many saints of the Lord who, with their testimony of life, help us to come closer to Christ. We invite you to imitate them in their performance as disciples of Jesus and to aspire to be saints like them.

Christ only Savior

18. To welcome faith and let it transform our lives, we need to be saved by Christ with the firm conviction that “no one else can save; Under heaven we have been given no other name that can save us” (Acts 4:12).

19. Perhaps we are not clear about what salvation consists of and what we need to be saved from. Sometimes we believe that salvation would be achieving a better life in the material order and even achieving advances in the field of medicine to alleviate pain and find the necessary remedies for diseases that afflict us. Indeed, for some, salvation would have to come from science, from the invention and application of new technologies. God is not an enemy of the integral progress of the human being. But we know that no scientific or technical contribution can teach us to love, free us from loneliness, enable us to overcome vices, make us happy or give us eternal life.

20. Salvation is not found in any religious experience either. When one starts from fear and feeds on it, makes economic business with human suffering and there is no ethical commitment to improve life and do good, that religion dehumanizes man and turns him into a slave to fear, taboos and superstitions. Nor is the ideal of the religious man to achieve a kind of self-control, serenity or psychological balance; but the union with God that is manifested in concrete and helpful love for one’s neighbor.

21. True salvation is liberation from evil, from the power of sin, which enslaves physically and spiritually. It is a comprehensive transformation of the man, body and soul. True salvation is participation in the life of Christ and, therefore, participation in eternal life, a life that by grace we begin to have on this earth from the moment of baptism, but that will become full and definitive in perfect communion. with God in heaven[1].

22. That salvation welcomed in faith and received in the sacraments of the Church produces joy in the disciples of Christ. And as always happens when we are happy, we want to share that joy with others. Therefore, faith generates in us a missionary dynamism. There is no true Christian who does not share his faith with others: family, friends, neighbors, work or study colleagues.

23. The Christian faith is also essentially communal. Faith in Christ is not lived alone, but within the family of the children of God, which is the Church. The community of believers in Christ is a holy people, the people of God, called to walk together, offering a space of fraternity and welcome, and sharing the joy of the Gospel with everyone.

María de la Caridad, Mother of the Faith of the Cubans

24. At the conclusion of our message, the bishops direct our grateful prayer to the Virgin Mary of Charity of Cobre. She has been, without a doubt, the mother of the faith of many Cubans. She sustained the faith and hope of our mambises, in those difficult times of our history when they fought for the independence of the Homeland. At times when manifesting oneself as a Christian entailed risks and hostility for the disciples of Christ, She strengthened the faith of the faithful and guarded the faith of the weak in the silence of the heart. There are not a few who have directed their supplications, songs, flowers, candles and tears to him, in moments of pain or anguish, or to thank him for his intercession. How many of us have not reached Christ because the devotion to the Virgin of the Charity led us to Him!

25. The Bible tells us that, when Mary came to visit her relative Elizabeth, she greeted her like this: “Blessed are you who have believed, because what the Lord has said to you will be fulfilled.” (Lc 1, 45). In that beautiful greeting, Mary acquires, so to speak, a new and proper name: the one you have believed. That is, the woman of faith. Because he believed the Angel when he made him the proposal to welcome the Savior into his blessed womb (Lk 1, 26-39). Because he believed at the wedding at Cana that Jesus could give us the best (Jn 2, 1-11). Because he believed at the moment of the Cross that his Son was saving the world through love (Jn 19, 26-27). Because he believed that, in the midst of the nascent Church, the Spirit of his Risen Son was present and acting, and that this would be manifested to all nations and that disciples would be made in all of them (Acts 1:14).

26. Mother of Charity. Woman of simple, strong and persevering faith, guard the faith of this people and always show us the way to reach your Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

With our blessing and affection,

Havana, September 8, 2023

Solemnity of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre

 

+ Cardinal Juan de la C. García Rodríguez, Archbishop of Havana

+ Dionisio García Ibáñez, Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba

+ Wilfredo Pino Estévez, Archbishop of Camagüey

+ Emilio Aranguren Echeverría, Bishop of Holguín and President of the COCC

+ Arturo González Amador, Bishop of Santa Clara

+ Álvaro Beyra Luarca, Bishop of Bayamo-Manzanillo

+ Domingo Oropesa Lorente, Bishop of Cienfuegos

+ Juan de Dios Hernández Ruiz SJ, Bishop of Pinar del Río and Secretary General of the COCC

+ Juan Gabriel Díaz Ruiz, Bishop of Matanzas

+ Silvano Pedroso Montalvo, Bishop of Guantánamo-Baracoa

+ Marcos Pirán, Auxiliary Bishop of Holguín

+ Eloy Ricardo Domínguez Martínez, Auxiliary Bishop of Havana

1. Dariusz Josef Chalupznski, Diocesan Administrator of Ciego de Ávila

 

[1] cf. Placuit Deo. Letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. February 22, 2018.

 

Pres. 23. 041a. COCC – Believe in the Good News – 080923

Pres. 23. 041b. COCC – Believe in the Good News – 080923