Nicaraguan priests are forced to “provide their schedule and ask permission” of the Police
March 15, 2024 in La Prensa
The Nicaraguan lawyer Martha Patricia Molina denounced that priests feel under a type of home arrest because they have to report even that they are going to the supermarket and what they are going to buy.
Nicaraguan priests continue suffering the brutal persecution that the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has unleashed against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan lawyer and author of the report Nicaragua a Persecuted Church?, Martha Patricia Molina, denounced that now priests have to provide a “type of schedule” about their religious activities and ask permission of the Police.
“Priests now are forced to send to the Police the schedule of what they are going to do every day, a day in advance, if not they are threatened with death or being thrown in jail. One forgot to send it in because he was sick and hospitalized, and they threatened to kill him,” stated Molina to La Prensa.
Likewise, she said that the repressive pattern continues of Police on a daily basis visiting the rectories and parishes to take pictures, record videos, even when there are no faithful there.
Molina thinks that it is regrettable that the dictatorship continues persecuting the Catholic Church because “the priest are not enemies of anyone, they are only doing their pastoral work, but what I see is that Murillo wants to completely subdue them, since she has not been able to do it through her words, she wants to subdue them by force.”
They have to ask permission
Added to this, Molina points out that also the priests “have to ask permission, authorization.” And she cited, for example, that they have to ask permission even to go to visit the sick, go to the supermarket, the gas station and go to meet with Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes.
“For example, the Police ask them for the name and address of the sick person, how many hours the visit is going to take. Even to go to the supermarket they ask them what they are going to buy, even if they are going to meet with the Cardinal, they authorize whether they can go or not,” said Molina.
There are other priests, according to Molina, who have to present themselves every 15 days in Managua, specifically to the Police. “There they have to sign a document, where the name of the priest is, the time and the day,” specified the researcher.
Molina said that the priests feel they are “under house arrest, completely intimidated, harassed, under siege because there is no freedom for anything (…) several priests have told me that for them the time of broken glass has not ended,” in reference to the words that the co-ruler Rosario Murillo said to Cardinal Brenes.
In fact, the researcher stated that the Bishops of the Dioceses are aware of what the priests are experiencing as a consequence of the brutal persecution of Ortega, within the context of a multitude of restrictions on freedom of worship.
For the second consecutive year, the dictatorship cancelled the traditional pilgrimage to the National Sanctuary of Jesús del Rescate in Popoyuapa, Rivas. This year, in contrast from the past, the Diocese of Granada has not issued a statement.
Martha Patricia Molina is one of seven people in the world to have received the International Prize for Religious Freedom, granted by the International Office for Religious Freedom of the State Department of the United States.