This article provides a good summary of the current government´s relationship with the Catholic Church, as well as the history of the relationship between Ortega and the Church.
“The demon always has attacked us”. The Ortega-Murillo persecution against the Church”
By Divergentes, Sept 18, 2021
The Sandinistas have attacked the church and its most outstanding figures since the 1980s. Setting traps for priests, discrediting them, beating them, expelling them from the republic, accusing them of “anti-patriotic and criminal attitudes” come from more than 30 years ago. Starting with the rebellion of 2018 the Ortega-Murillo couple have attacked the church in an ongoing way, while Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes responds, “The church always attends the funeral of its persecutors.”
Fr. Edwin Román from the San Miguel Arcángel parish in Masaya, finds himself outside the country for some months now. His image is one of those that stand out the most in the campaign that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have unleashed against him and other Catholic religious, like Silvio Báez, Rolando Álvarez and Abelardo Mata. “Some politicians wear a cassock” is the name of a video published through the apparatus of Sandinista propaganda, while the presidential couple have called them “money changers” and “demons in cassocks.”
The aggression of the Sandinista Front against Fr. Edwin Román goes back several years. But it increased since 2011, when he was pastor of Nindirí and held processions to show solidarity with relatives of Fr. Marlon Pupiro, murdered in August of that year. Pupiro was the pastor of la Concepción, Masaya, but he had relatives in Nindirí. So with this death Román called for a way of the cross, which angered the members of the Citizen Power Councils (CPC) of the Sandinista Front of the town. “That began the attacks on my person,” says Román.
The Sandinistas shouted vulgarities at him when they saw Román walk toward the priest´s house and monitored his homilies. Later on, they tried to take over the parking lot of his church, and a very tense situation happened there. In fact, he called the Sandinista mayor, Clarisa Vivas, to tell her that she “had all the money, but I have the people.” The situation was resolved as he expected, “because got the people to rise up and the population themselves defended the place.” Since then, they threatened him with what could happen to him “the same as what happened to Fr. Pupiro.”
The attacks of the Sandinistas against Fr Edwin Román show in some way the relationship that they have had with the Catholic Church since the 1980s, when they rose to power after overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship. In the words of Román, since that first presidential period “there was a persecution of religious,” because “the devil has always attacked the church.”
Since the political crisis exploded in April 2018, Fr. Edwin Román has been one of several Catholic religious who have accompanied the victims of the repression of the Ortega-Murillo regime. Román has done it in Masaya, one of the most repressed towns. He treated the wounded, interceded for those abducted, and protected threatened citizens. In November 2019 he experienced, along with several mothers of political prisoners who were holding a hunger strike for the freedom of their offspring in his parish, a brutal siege of the Police where during nine days they cut off their water and electric services to subdue them. It was an action that became known around the world and awoke the solidarity of thousands of people.
The sociologist Sergio Cabrales, who did an investigation on the role of the Church since 2018, says that the resilience of this religious institutions has meant “the cost of repression for the institution, while the Sandinistas remain in power.” But also “it leaves benefits, expressed in the growing respect for the institution,” in spite of the lessening number of its members.
From July 2018, when Daniel Ortega accused the bishops of being “coup supporters”, until August 2020, when the fire occurred that burned the image of the Sangre de Cristo in the Cathedral of Managua, the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) counted 24 direct attacks against the Catholic Church.
“Pharisees, money changers and sons of the devil”
One year later, just a few months before the presidential elections, the Ortega-Murillo regime has again taken up attacks against the religious. This past July 30th Ortega called them “Pharisees” because according to him the priests blessed the demonstrators in the 2018 protests. Three days later, on August 2nd, when he was ratified as a candidate for the presidency, along with Rosario Murillo, candidate for vice president, he called the priests “hypocrites, money changers of the temple” because “they took over the churches and deceived people and behaved as if they had the highest moral authority” during the rebellion three years ago.
On August 10th, the Archdiocese of Managua issued a press release where they said that “conditions do not exist to hold democratic elections” in Nicaragua, after the regime arrested 32 opposition leaders as of that date, among them seven presidential aspirants and the legal status was cancelled of three political parties. Three days later, the Sandinista strong man called them “sons of the devil” because “some (demonstrators in 2018) set on fire citizens who were murdered, tortured or police who were tortured and later burned alive, with the applause and encouragement of some priests.”
That same night Rosario Murillo called the priests “sons of the devil.” And even though she did not say his name, she referred to Fr. Edwin Román, as a “criminal” who “profaned the church in Masaya some time ago”. She said that there was another priest who in 2018 “rang the bells for people to come out to die.”
Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, before he showed symptoms of COVID-19, said about those attacks that “when one person offends us, it is up to us to pray for those who persecute, hate and slander us, just as Jesus Christ did,” and he added, “on one occasion it was said that the church always attends the funeral of its persecutors.”
Attacks since 2018
The first aggression against the church during the 2018 protests happened in the first days, April 20, 2018, when the Cathedral of Managua was invaded by supporters of the Government who attacked the young people who met in the religious church to collect provisions and deliver them to the demonstrators repressed in different points of the country.
Starting then, several churches have been looted and many priests attacked by Sandinista mobs. On July 9, 2018 the auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio Báez, the Nuncio Stanislaw Sommertag and Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes , were beated by paramilitaries in the San Sebastian Basilica of Diriamba, when a committee of religious went to that place to mediate over an imminent massacre.
Since October 2018 a persecution began against bishop Silvio Báez, with the publication of audios where the religious is heard saying, “what is urgent at this moment is that we unite in what we agree upon, and I think that now what we all agree on is that Ortega has to go.” In addition, he called for dialogue and discarded violent options.
Nevertheless, this motivated the Sandinistas to maintain a campaign to discredit Báez for “making an apology for Satan.” Even in the provincial office of León, some Sandinista followers wrote a letter to send to Pope Francis to express repudiation of the bishop. Finally, Báez was forced into exile on April 23, 2019. Since then, he has not returned to the country.
In September 2019 the general commissioner Ramón Avellán, Assistant Director of the National Police, attacked the priest Edwin Román. In those days the priest Pedro Méndez was also attacked by Sandinista mobs, the pastor of the Maria Magdalena Church in the indigenous neighborhood of Monimbó in Masaya.
Another attack against the religious has been from the economic side. Since 2018 Ortega and Murillo have ordered eliminating from nearly all the parishes of the country the funds that they used to receive from the General Budget of the Republic with a reform at the end of that year. The Archdiocese of Managua which Cardinal Brenes leads, was the most affected by the reduction in the funding.
Since 2018 the Church has denounced arbitrary acts of Migration against foreign priests. Two pastors, Fray Damián Cosme Muratori, responsible for the Tepeyac Sanctuary in San Rafael del Norte and the Salvadoran priest Julio César Melgar, had their status of residency cancelled. Both were granted extensions to remain in Nicaragua, nevertheless, Melgar died in August of COVID-19.
Migration authorities also blocked the entry into Nicaragua of two pastors Fray Santos Fabián Mejía and Fray José Javier Lemus. While the Colombian priest, Luis Alirio Carrillo, who belonged to the parish of San Judas Tadeo in Estelí, left the country in October 16, 2020 by order of Migration, after they cancelled his residency which expired in January 2022. They only gave Carillo one month to leave the country. “His residency in Nicaragua was revoked, all for making pronouncements against injustices and human evil,” pointed out the diocese of Estelí in a press release.
In the annual report on “International Religious Freedom” that the State Department of the United States published in May, it states that the State of Nicaragua was placed on Special Oversight for having committed or tolerated serious violations of religious liberty. Among them, that in 2020 “Catholic and Protestant leaders who provided refuge and medical assistance to peaceful demonstrators in 2018 continue suffering reprisals from the government, including slander, arbitrary investigations, charges that they said were unfounded, withholding of tax exemptions, reduction in budget assignments and religious privation.”
“Terrorist act” against the Sangre de Cristo
Among the 24 attacks that CENIDH recorded against the church is one of a Russian woman who threw sulphuric acid in the face of the priest Mario Guevara, when he was hearing confessions. The woman was sentenced to eight years, but just spent a few months in jail, because she was freed and sent to Italy, where she attacked a man knifing him in a bar in Turin, according to Italian media. According to CENIDH, this case reflects the corrupt way in which the Ortega-Murillo regime operates, so that “the crimes that they orchestrate end up in impunity.”
There have been invasions of religious churches since them, but the most serious one was the fire in the chapel of the image of the Sangre de Cristo in the Cathedral of Managua. A few minutes after it happened and without having more details, Rosario Murillo make it known that the fire had been caused by “the existence of candles in the area around the Sangre de Cristo…They are the candles that the faithful light.” Along the same lines, the National Police pointed out that the fire was caused by “a n easily combustible plastic sprayer of alcohol.”
Nevertheless, Cardinal Brenes said that “it was a terrorist act planned with a lot of calm,” and contradicted Murillo, “in the area there were no candles…because candles are not put around statues that are over 50 years old.”
Ortega´s forgiveness
On July 7, 2004, in full electoral campaign for the elections that returned them to power, Daniel Ortega asked forgiveness of the church for all the acts that the Sandinistas committed against the religious in the 1980s. “We were mistaken, we committed a lot of mistakes and we abused very respected figures of the Church,” Ortega said, in a speech that he gave in the city of Jinotepe.
That day, in front of the plaza of the town, the Commandante was accompanied by Fr. Bismark Carballo, who was stripped naked and beaten in public on August 11, 1982, when he was the object of a manipulation, where the religious supposedly was the lover of a woman – which the General office of State Security carried out against him, led by Lenin Cerna. “We abused such respected figures as Monseñor Carballo, who we now offer apologies in public so that there be no doubt of our sincere acceptance of those mistakes,” said Ortega, who announced a mass for reconciliation where Fr. Carballo hugged Lenin Cerna.
Carballo was very critical of the Sandinista at the beginning of the 1980s. “The bishops denounced the danger of what it meant to copy the Cuban model. All that was causing negative reactions,” said Carballo in an interview with La Prensa in 2001, years before Ortega would apologize. “When they displaced the Mískitos from the shores of the Rio Coco, for example, the violation of their human rights was denounced and that also caused a lot of anger in the Government, in addition to the opposition to Military Service,” added the religious, today an ally of those who attacked him.
Declarations like these caused the Sandinistas to mount the trap against Carballo. Nevertheless, since Daniel Ortega apologized to him, the relations with the religious improved. A sister of his, Esther Margarita, was named ambassador to the Vatican in 2017.
In the 1980s the Sandinistas also accused the priest Luis Amado Peña of conspiring with the Contras and took him to the Somocist Courts. During four months they kept him confined to the Seminary. In those days they expelled from Nicaragua 10 foreign priests who were in solidarity with Peña.
To denounce this, Bishop Pablo Antonio Vegas, the Vice President of the Episcopal Conference at that time and one of the bishops who most strongly raised his voice against the Sandinista Government, travelled to the Vatican along with the Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, Bosco Vicas and Abelardo Mata. Out of that negotiation came the suspension divinis of Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel D´Escoto and the expulsion of Fernando Cardenal from the Society of Jesus.
In 1986 Vega travelled to Washington to denounce before the State Department the crime against three of his lay ministers at the hands of the Sandinistas, and the repression that they continued exercising against the peasantry. When he returned to Nicaragua, they summoned him to a meeting to arrest him. They took him to the Penitentiary system and transported him by helicopter to the border with Honduras, where they him abandoned him.
The Sandinistas accused the priest of an “anti-patriotic and criminal attitude” in supporting the anti-Sandinista guerrillas and justifying an eventual US intervention in the country. The measure consisted in “indefinitely suspending the right” of Pablo Antonio Vega to “remain in the country” and was effective “as long as the aggression of the Government of the United States was maintained against Nicaragua.”
But the attacks continued in the 1990s, after the Sandinistas left power. In 1993 a mob beat the now bishop of Granada, Jorge Solórzano, when he was the pastor of the San Pablo Apóstol church located in the 14th of September neighborhood in Managua.
The man who led the mob was Rafael Váldez, who in 2018 led the publication of audio against Bishop Silvio Báez, in addition he stood out in that same year for asking Pope Francis to remove from the country the auxiliary bishop of Managua, Mons. Silvio Báez. Valdez Rodríguez also led the Sandinista mobs that took the cathedral of Managua and attacked Fr. Rodolfo López in November 2019.
The relationship with Cardenal Obando y Bravo
For the electoral campaign of 2006 Daniel Ortega sought out a rapprochement with Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, with whom he had intense clashes since the 1980s. The Cardinal gave first communion to the current couple in power. He also married the rulers in a private ceremony. The religious stuck to the Sandinista discourse, that at that time called on working “for the common good” and “reconciliation.”
As has already been said, the clashes between the Sandinistas and the Cardinal go back to the 1980s. That is why Ortega called him “the chaplain of Somocismo.” For the 1990 elections, the Cardinal called all citizens to vote in accordance with their consciences, “not out of fear nor for handouts.” Once he lost the elections, Ortega called him a “Pharisee” and “soiling the word of Christ.” Obando y Bravo responded that “a serpent that lives, kills and dies spitting venom.”
The Cardinal used a similar parable prior to the next elections in 1996, where once again Ortega competed as a candidate for the Sandinista Front. Two days before the elections, Obando appeared dressed in red, the colors of the Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC), that had as their candidate Arnoldo Alemán, who was seated in the first row with a shirt of that color during a mass in the Cathedral of Managua.
Obando, at that time, told the parable of the viper. The story was about two men who came upon a snake on their path who was dying of cold. One of them wanted to give it some heat so it would not die, but the other one warned him that “that snake was dangerous, that it had already killed and that if he revived it, it would kill again.” But the man who wanted to give the snake some heat said that the circumstances had changed, got down, grabbed the serpent and put it against his chest to warm it. And then, when the snake was revived by the human heat which that man had given him, bit him and killed him. “Christians do not have hate, but should take certain norms of prudence, if not they will have happen what the story talks about,” said the Cardinal. Two days later, Daniel Ortega lost the elections again.
The pandemic also has placed up front the postures of the Church and the Ortega-Murillo regime. While religious leaders suspend processions to avoid crowding, Sandinista mayors organize processions with copies of saint statues, bands and some promise makers. “This is sad,” said the bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, one of those most attacked by the presidential couple., “We have reached the extreme where now the municipal governments have become pseudo-parishes and the mayors have become pseudo-priests, because they are taking the place that belongs to the church,” he added. In one of his most recent homilies Álvarez recalled with emphasis the refrain, “do not touch God with dirty hands.”