24-May-2000 -- ZENIT News Agency. www.zenit.org
BOSTON, (ZENIT.org).- At the 2000 Commencement Exercises Monday at the Alumni Stadium of Boston College, Jaime Cardinal Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana, was declared Doctor of Laws, "honoris causa," by the President, Reverend William P. Leahy, S.J.
The official "laudatio" described the Cuban Cardinal in this way: "Laboring in the fields of the Lord, cultivating the seed of faith, he personifies the post-revolution Catholic Church of Cuba. Two years after ordination, he served 10 months in a detention camp for suspected
enemies of the revolution. Thirty-two years later, as Cardinal Archbishop of Havana, he stood in the international spotlight with Pope John Paul II, celebrating Mass on the Plaza de la Revolución, where, for nearly forty years, Fidel Castro and his lieutenants had exclusively held the stage.
Chief shepherd to a flock of four-and-a-half million and steward of a religious heritage linked to the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World, he has weathered decades of relentless atheism, navigating a beleaguered Church through difficult times. To signify esteem and fraternal
affection for a heroic ecclesiastic, wearing the crimson mantle of his nation's hopes and prayers, with fortitude and grace, Boston College declares Jaime Cardinal Ortega Doctor of Laws, honoris causa." |