Dictatorship wins the battle with the Catholic Church, which it has been able to tame in Nicaragua
La Prensa, March 8, 2024
On March 7, 2024 the so called “co-president” Rosario Murillo celebrated the fact that the regime has prevailed over the Church after having first abducted and then banished two bishops and dozens of priests. The Murillo´s reasons for boasting are plain to see.
On January 14, 2024 the Archbishop of Managua, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, sent a message to the priests of his Archdiocesis. “ My good priests: After a dialogue between the Government of Nicaragua and the Holy See, it was agreed to send Mons. Rolando, Mon. Isidoro, Priests and two seminarians to Rome.”
The brief note of three short paragraphs ended in a succinct way, “I beg you all to pray for the Bishops and Priests so that the Grace of the Lord never fail them and the Holy Spirit guide them in all moments of their lives.” It was not an until later, but a good-bye, a clear sign that the trip for the two seminarians, 15 priests and two bishops had no return.
Murillo celebrates, congratulating Cardinal Brenes
Nearly two months later, the so called “co-president” Rosario Murillo, in her midday monologue on March 7 congratulated Cardinal Brenes with saccharine words. He was turning 75 years of age, and she said, without concealing her joy, that “he has come leaving behind the days of bell ringing and broken glass, terrible days when they tried to break the sense of family and community.” For Murillo, the struggle has ended in a victory for the regime.
In reality, since the negotiation with the Vatican, the days were left behind of the extortion of the regime against a sector of the Church which strongly denounced the abuses of the dictatorship, and which is why the dictators had no qualms about imprisoning for more than 500 days Mons. Rolando Álvarez, the Bishop of Matagalpa and apostolic administrator of Estelí. Álvarez had been sentenced without trial nor evidence to 26 years in prison for supposed treason against the country.
Mons. Isidoro Mora, the Bishop of Siuna, had spent three weeks in prison, his “crime”: having asked for prayers for Álvarez. That arrest, days before Christmas, had unleashed a roundup of priests in key positions in different dioceses of the country: vicars, chancellors, bursars, pastors of important churches. All key positions for the functioning of the ecclesial territories.
But this was just the most recent offensive of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo against the Catholic Church. Previously they had expelled 12 priests who also had been earlier detained for insinuating, at best, slight criticism of the regime. And for months they had expelled or prohibited the entry of dozens of priests, expelled entire religious orders, and confiscated the Central American University from the Jesuits.
A negotiation which “was not easy”, rather a capitulation.
Four days after the note from Brenes to the priests, the Foreign Minister of the Vatican, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, recognized that the negotiation with the Ortega regime “was not easy.” Nevertheless, the scope of the negotiation is just now becoming known.
The regime always sought to silence the Church in Nicaragua. With the exception of Álvarez, Mora, and a handfull of priests who paid for their prophetic courage with their freedom, most of the bishops and priests within the country kept quiet in order to avoid being arrested.
But the “negotiation” did not just achieve the banishment and denationalization of the inconvenient priests and bishops, but was able to silence even those banished. Neither Álvarez nor Mora, nor any of the 27 priests who have been banished in the two groups to the Vatican have spoken again.
And one voice which strongly criticized the regime on a weekly basis, and was out of their reach, the voice of auxiliary bishop of Managua, Mons. Silvio Báez, exiled in Miami since 2019, has not spoken since then either.
Immediately after the release and banishment of the 19 religious, Báez was urgently called to the Vatican. After his visit it was reported that Pope Francis had ratified Báez in his position as auxiliary bishop of Managua. What was not explained is how nor why Báez considerably lowered his profile. The auxiliary bishop used to offer Mass every Sunday in the St. Agatha Church in Miami, in a sector with a lot of Nicaraguans, and would send a copy of his Sunday homily to La Prensa to be published. Not anymore.
This past February 20 he surprised people with a message in his X account (previously Twitter), “Greetings from the Miami airport. I am travelling to Italy to lead two groups of spiritual exercises…” Since then he has not said anything about Nicaragua.
Fr. Edwin Román, also exiled since 2020, was transferred from the St Agatha church, in a zone with many Nicaraguans, to another parish in southern Miami where there are much fewer Nicaraguans among the faithful.
A Church that was afraid of being left without priests
The Venezuelan academic, Edgard Beltrán, in an essay published in the magazine Law and Liberty, referred to the “tribulations of the Nicaraguan Church.” Beltrán mentioned that “after Ortega expelled the Apostolic Nuncio (Waldemar Sommertag in March 2022) the bishops became the only representatives of the Vatican in the country. Therefore, they play the role of negotiators in the name of the Pope…Secondly, they simply are afraid that saying too much might lead to an even greater persecution of the Church, and therefore, leave the faithful without priests and bishops who might guide them in the faith,” wrote Beltrán.
But his article continued with a succinct statement, “Nevertheless, the silence has not diminished the persecution against the Church.”
Priests close to the regime instead of those banished and a Chinese-style relationship
Beyond the silence of the Church in Nicaragua and that of its banished bishops and priests, it is more and more evident that the negotiations had greater implications, and that Pope Francis ceded to pressures from the regime so that Nicaragua might implement a scheme similar to what exists in China, where the regime has the power to veto the naming of bishops.
Just to mention two emblematic cases, a few weeks ago Brenes named the priests Antonio Castro and Boarnerges Carballo to parishes which were left without priests after the offensive of the regime. Carballo is the brother of Mons. Bismarck Carballo, who after having been humiliated by the Sandinista regime in the 1980s, now is close to Ortega and refuses to make criticisms or question the Government.
For his part Castro is an open supporter of Ortega since the 1980s, and has celebrated masses for the soul of Hugo Chávez.
And it is still left to be seen how the decimated episcopal conference will be recomposed. At this point three of the ten dioceses do not have bishops: Matagalpa, Siuna and Estelí, while the Archdiocese of Managua does not have an auxiliary bishop inside the country.
Call for a “bigger and louder condemnation” fell on deaf ears
When it became clear that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church of Nicaragua and the Vatican itself had accepted the interference of the regime in the decisions of the Church, the fear of many people was confirmed.
With the confiscation of the UCA, the Jesuit [sic] priest John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, stated in an article published in the Washington Post, that “the attempts of Ortega to extinguish Catholicism in Nicaragua deserves a worldwide condemnation on a much larger and louder scale.”
Jenkins stated that he “would not accept anything less than the complete restoration of the right of the Church to designate its bishops and do its ministerial and charity work.”
He recognized that Nicaragua is possibly not receiving the attention it deserves due to the competition with other conflicts, like Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
“The actions of the Ortega regime against the Church are an insult to religious liberty and individual rights,” said Jenkins in an interview with La Prensa. “The regime has more possibilities of feeling the pressure from government leaders, which is why I hope that a broader and louder condemnation might come from nations who value freedom and the freedom of worship.”
Nicaragua alongside totalitarian regimes
As a result of the persecution of the Church, Nicaraguan has fallen into international rankings close to regimes like Russia, China and India, where religious freedom and freedom of conscience is limited and violated using mechanisms which now have been implemented in Nicaragua by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Frederick Davie is the current assistant director of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Davie has known the situation of the Catholic Church under the Ortega governments for 40 years. In the decade of the 1980s Davie travelled to Nicaragua to learn first-hand the situation that the Catholic Church was experiencing then along with some Protestant churches. Around that time he met Ortega in New York, who was participating in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Murillo accompanied Ortega on that trip.
“Nearly 40 years later, it is extremely disappointing the direction which these two people have taken, President Ortega and Vice President Murillo, and the levels of oppression that they have carried out on their people, when they were supposed to establish a new era of freedom and opportunity for the people of Nicaragua,” said Davie in an interview from Washington.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is responsible for monitoring freedom of worship around the world. This commission prepares a list of countries where it considers the freedom of worship is being violated, and makes recommendations to the State Department about sanctions to be adopted to pressure those responsible for the repression.
This past January 4th, on the recommendation of this Commission, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, designated Nicaragua as a “country of particular interest for being involved in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom.” This is the worst designation which can be made about a country, Davie explained.
The Commission knows in detail the different attacks which the regime has launched against the Catholic Church, its priests, bishops, religious orders, faithful, communications media and universities.
“We are seeing a very severe violation of religious freedom in Nicaragua, and we want to be sure that the US government is using all the tools available to deal with this issue and to get the government to cease and desist from repressing the rights of the people to exercise their freedom of religion,” said Davie.
Can stronger sanctions be expected?
Davie explained that among the sanctions applied so far there have been cancelations of visas of people from the regime of Managua directly involved in the repression against the Catholic Church. But sanctions of this type have been applied after the repression of the 2018 protests without having been able to produce a change in attitude in the Government.
Davie mentioned another type of sanctions that could make the situation of the regime more difficult, but which, nevertheless, would affect the economy of the country and intensify the poverty of those already most vulnerable: blocking loans and donations from the international community to Nicaragua.
“We have called on the Government of the United States and all other international institutions to increase the scrutiny of any loan or technical support from international financial institutions to Nicaragua,” Davie explained. “This is possible, and I believe that the Government of the United States and governments around the world committed to religious freedom and freedom of conscience need to use these instruments and procedures available to them to go directly against the individuals and agencies in Nicaragua responsible for this repression.”
And the fact is that despite the sporadic rhetoric of Washington against the Ortega regime, international organizations like the Interamerican Development Bank (IADB), the World Bank (WB) and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) of which the United States is not a party, have continued the flow of resources into the coffers of the regime.
Last year Nicaragua received from financial organizations and bilateral agencies some 682.9 million dollars, most coming from the CABEI. The World Bank contributed 47.7 million and the IADB 40.2 million.
“If they focus on loans to Nicaragua, among other types of donations which the International Community grants to Nicaragua, they will be able to exercise the level of pressure on the Government that, over time, will result in the fact that the Government would stop this level of repression against the people of Nicaragua,” explained Davie.
The State Department, for its part, maintains its criticism of Nicaragua, but does not show signs of preparing different sanctions that might make the repression stop in Nicaragua.
“We remain very concerned about the ongoing harassment of the regime of the Jesuits, Catholic clergy and other practicing religious,” said the spokesperson for the State Department to La Prensa. “We reiterate our calls urging the Government to promote the security of the clergy and the faithful, as well as security in all places of religious adoration.”
But the calls of Davie and the Commission of the United States on International Religious Freedom have not yet been able to get greater scrutiny of the loans and donations from financial organizations to Nicaragua. Not even in spite of the fact that many of the funds which the IADB, IMF and World Bank manage have their origins in the United States. In summary, even though there can be a lot of rhetoric, in reality the regime, at least for now, has won the struggle with the Church. It has decimated the Episcopal Conference, expelled the Nuncio, three bishops – including Báez – and as many priests as it wanted, in this time of Lent, the most important period for Catholics; processions cannot go into the streets as has been the tradition, and the regime has not had to pay any consequences. The reasons for Murillo to boast are in plain sight.