Name Juan Rodriguez Posthumous style none | Religious style Archbishop Spoken style Your Excellency | |
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Juan de la Caridad Garcia Rodriguez (born 11 July 1948) is a prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He was appointed Archbishop of Havana on 26 April 2016. He previously served as an Auxiliary Bishop of Camagüey from 1997 to 2002 and then as Archbishop of that diocese from 2002 to 2016. He is a past president of the Cuban Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Biography
He was born in Camagüey on 11 July 1948. He was a member of the first group of Cuban priests to be educated entirely in Cuba. He studied at Saint Basil the Great Seminary in El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba, and then at Saints Charles and Ambrose Seminary (now the Father Felix Varela Cultural Center) in Havana. He was ordained a priest on 25 January 1972. In the years after his ordination he worked in parishes that are now part of the Ciego de Ávila Diocese.
In March 1997 he was named auxiliary bishop of Camagüey and was consecrated bishop in Camagüey's Our Lady of Mercy Church on 7 June 1997 by Adolfo Rodríguez Herrera, the Bishop of Camagüey. He chose as His episcopal motto "Go and announce the Gospel". Camagüey became an archdiocese in late 1998 and he was named to succeed Herrera as Archbishop in February 2002. He developed evangelization programs in which grandparents, who still remembered their education in Catholicism as children, taught the principles of Catholicism to their grandchildren. He also, with government permission, establish prison ministries.
García Rodríguez was the president of the First National Missions Assembly in Havana in 2006. He was elected president of the Cuban Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2006 and served until 2010. He represented Cuba at the fifth general assembly of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007, which ended with the promulgation of the Declaration of Aparecida drafted by Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires (later Pope Francis). The Vatican named him a member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in February 2007.
He participated in the 2014 sessions of the Synod on the Family.
On 26 April 2016, Pope Francis named him Archbishop of Havana to succeed Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino. Granma, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, reported his appointment.