The remains of Monsignor Pedro Meurice Estiú, archbishop emeritus of Santiago de Cuba who died in 2011, will be reinterred in the Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba, reported the Archbishopric of that city.
Next Wednesday, July 12 at 6:00 pm, a funeral mass will be celebrated and his mortal remains will be reburied, in the Holy Metropolitan Basilica Cathedral Church of Santiago de Cuba, said in a public letter Dionisio García Ibáñez, Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba.
The religious invited to the obsequies “lay faithful, religious men and women, priests, the people of Santiago de Cuba and those people who knew and shared with our remembered and beloved archbishop.”
García Ibañez considered that this action is “a way of making him present as an example of a pastor worthy of imitating the next generations of Christians and Cubans.”
“I call on you to do everything possible to participate as a community in this Holy Mass, in this thanksgiving for the gift of your life. In it we will entrust him to the Lord and we will ask for his family, for our beloved archdiocese and for all our people that he always placed in the hands of the Virgin of Charity to entrust to his Son Jesus ”, the letter concludes.
Meurice Estiú, a strong critic of the Cuban regime, died in 2011 in Miami at the age of 79 due to a heart attack.
The religious gained worldwide notoriety on January 24, 1998, during the historic visit of John Paul II, when, as Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, delivered a harsh message against the regime at the mass offered by the Pontiff in that city.
Before Raúl Castro, Meurice Estiú pointed out that Cubans should “demystify false messianisms” and presented the Pope with a panorama of “realities” of a country “torn by exile”, “selfishness”, “poverty of freedom” and ” the foreign blockade.
“I also present to you a growing number of Cubans who have confused the Homeland with a party, the Nation with the historical process that we have experienced in recent decades, and culture as an ideology,” he said.
Born on February 23, 1932 in San Luis, in the province of Santiago de Cuba, Meurice Estiú studied philosophy at the seminary in that region and theology in Havana and the Dominican Republic.
He was ordained a priest in 1955 and served as Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba from 1970 to 2007, when Pope Benedict XVI accepted his resignation and appointed Monsignor Dionisio García in his place.
In the last mass he celebrated, on February 18, 2007, the prelate said he expected the arrival of “a splendid day, a sunny day” for “all Cubans, whatever they think, whether they believe in God or not, wherever they are.” , inside Cuba or outside of Cuba”.
“The day will come when so much pain and suffering, so much work, so much sweat, will not be in vain, they will bear fruit and abundant fruit. And we will all be able to enjoy joy, peace, unity,” he said at his farewell mass in Santiago de Cuba.
