Despite protests from the Latin American Church and an appeal from the Vatican for dialogue a understanding, the Nicaraguan government continues to raise tensions with the local clergy. 

Since August 4, President Daniel Ortega’s regime has been forbidding Bishop Rolando Alvarez of Matagalpa to leave his rectory, along with a group of five members of the clergy and six lay Catholics. The bishop, who has been accused of promoting subversion against the government, showed on social media that police forces are blocking the diocese’s building.

Alvarez’s house arrest occurred after he protested the sudden shutdown of seven Catholic radio stations by the government in the region. A priest in his diocese is also being impeded to leave his parish’s house. On August 14, the Diocese of Siuna announced that Father Oscar Benavidez was arrested and taken by the police without any apparent reason.

Over the past few weeks, churches all over the Central American nation have been forbidden to organize street processions by the police. In Managua, the country’s capital city, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes had to lead a procession inside the cathedral on August 13, after the government impeded religious celebrations on the street.

“In July, dozens of thousands of people attended a celebration in honour of the Holy Child and the authorities did not like that,” affirmed a priest of Matagalpa who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns.

The priest said that patrols have been intimidating churchgoers and priests. “They pass in front of the church and take pictures of us,” he described. In all dioceses, people are being told to go to the church in their own cars or on foot, avoiding buses.

The priest was accompanying Rev. Alvarez when he was impeded to leave his rectory on August 4. 

“I talked to some of the policemen. They told me they are Catholic but they have to obey their commanders. We know the orders are coming from their superiors,” he told Catholic Herald.

Ortega has been persecuting the Church since 2018, when a great wave of protests broke out and took thousands of people to the streets for months. Initially marching against a pensions’ reform, the demonstrators – most of them young – ended up showing their general dissatisfaction with Ortega, who ruled the country in the 1980s and now has been in office since 2007.

The fierce police repression resulted in more than 300 deaths and in hundreds of arrests.

“Ortega has never forgiven the Church for taking the side of the people, opening the chapels’ doors for them,” said a Nicaraguan priest currently working in neighbouring El Salvador. He also asked to remain unidentified.

Since the 2018 protests, Ortega’s regime has been acting against several opponents, including politicians and journalists who were either imprisoned or had to leave Nicaragua. 

“Now, his target is the Church. He has been reducing our space, impeding us to work, and arresting clergy,” said the Matagalpa priest.

One of the most shocking measures taken by Ortega against the Church was the expulsion of the Missionaries of Charity – the congregation founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 1950 – from Nicaragua. Eighteen sisters had to leave to Costa Rica on July 6.

Another serious event was the expulsion in March of the Rev. Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, the nuncio to Nicaragua since 2018. He took part in the Church’s effort to intermediate the negotiation between protesters and the government in 2018 and 2019, which did not produce any result. From then on, he had been seen as an adversary by the government. 

“I think power has maddened Ortega and his wife [Vice President Rosario Murillo]. They want the Church to submit to them,” said the Nicaraguan missionary in El Salvador. 

He said that he visited his family in the country in July and noted how poverty has increased lately. “The youth has no opportunities and poverty is everywhere. Things will keep deteriorating, since Ortega has closed non-governmental organisations that helped the poor,” he described.

The Matagalpa priest told the Catholic Herald that many in the country are waiting for a strong reaction from Pope Francis.

“Everybody considers strange that the Vatican has been mostly silent. But we do not know if it is negotiating something behind close doors,” he affirmed.

On August 11, the Rev. Juan Antonio Cruz Serrano, the Vatican’s observer to the Organisation of the American States, took part on a session of the body’s permanent council about the situation in Nicaragua. He stated that the “Holy See cannot fail to express its concern in this regard, while assuring those who are committed to dialogue as an indispensable instrument of democracy and guarantor of a more humane and fraternal civilization that it always wishes to collaborate with.” 

Rev. Cruz also said that the Holy See “appeals to the parties to find ways of understanding.”

Over the past days, the Bishops’ Conferences of several Latin American countries sent messages of solidarity to the Nicaraguan episcopate. 

The Episcopal Conference of Latin America (known as CELAM in Spanish) sent a letter to the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference last week manifesting its concern about the mounting persecution against the Church in the country.

Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos Vidarte of Trujillo, Peru, and Archbishop Jorge Eduardo Lozano of San Juan de Cuyo (Argentina), CELAM’s President and Vice President, signed the document. They mentioned the “siege to priests and bishops, the expulsion of members of religious communities, the desecration of temples and the shutdown of radio stations” and affirmed that they were “deeply hurt.”

By now, no solution seems to be near, said the Matagalpa priest. “Our defence are the rosary and our prayers.”

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