The Nicaraguan regime of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, “co-president” Rosario Murillo, is stepping up its attacks on the Catholic Church. On Wednesday, December 20, Nicaraguan police intercepted Bishop Isidro del Carmen Mora Ortega as he was on his way to the confirmation of 230 parishioners in the parish of Santa Cruz in La Cruz de Río Grande, a remote municipality on the southern Caribbean coast . The bishop was arrested and his whereabouts are still unknown.
This is the latest episode of persecution against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, where attacks have escalated over the past year. According to Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer and author of the study Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?, the Catholic Church in Nicaragua has suffered 740 attacks by the Sandinista regime since 2018, when mass anti-government protests broke out.
“In 2023 alone, 275 attacks were carried out. We can say that last year was the year with the most attacks against the Church in the last five years,” Molina tells EL PAÍS. In addition, “176 religious men and women are not serving in Nicaragua because they have been expelled, banned from entering the country, or sent into exile.”
Bishop Isidro Mora, who was arrested by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. Diocese of Granada-Nicaragua
The most recent case of this occurred last October, when a dozen priests held as political prisoners were released from prison and put on a plane to Rome. However, this tactic dates back to 2018, when the Ortega-Murillo regime forced the auxiliary bishop of Managua, Monsignor Silvio Báez – one of the most critical voices in the church against Nicaragua's authoritarian tendencies and human rights abuses – into exile. Father Edwin Román, a priest who played a key role in protecting citizens from repression in the city of Masaya during the 2018 protests, was also exiled.
In March 2022, the Nicaraguan government also expelled the Vatican nuncio, Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag. The Holy See described the expulsion of its representative in Nicaragua as surprising and painful. From that moment on, relations between Managua and the Vatican continued to deteriorate, to the point where the Ortega-Murillo regime decided last March to “suspend diplomatic relations” with the Vatican. The persecution of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua even forced Pope Francis to break with the Vatican's neutrality policy. In a statement in March this year, I compared the Nicaraguan government to “the Hitler dictatorship of 1935.” “With all due respect, I have no choice but to think that the person who leads [Daniel Ortega] is unstable,” he added, further angering the presidential couple.
All kinds of attacks and desecrations
A timeline of persecution against the Catholic Church compiled by EL PAÍS includes attacks on priests and bishops, church desecrations, the forced closure of media and NGOs managed by dioceses, the freezing of bank accounts and a persistent narrative against Catholicism and its leaders. For example, on January 24, 2022, Murillo called priests “retarded and backward” and argued that they “disguise themselves with masks and supposedly elegant costumes.”
“The numbers before 2022 are between 55 and 84 attacks. Subsequently, 2022 was ranked as the worst year for the Catholic Church, as 171 attacks were carried out. We did not think that this year, 2023, would be even worse than 2022, since 275 attacks have already been carried out against the religious institution during this period,” says Molina.
This Easter, the regime's police cracked down on believers and priests, and processions were expressly banned in Nicaragua. Similar bans have also been imposed throughout the year, including at the Conception of Mary procession in early December, when Nicaragua celebrates its national saint.
People take part in an Easter procession in Managua in March 2023.Inti Ocon (AP)
“So far, a total of 3,639 displays of popular piety, i.e. processions, have been banned across the country,” says Molina. “The aim of this persecution is always the same: to make the Catholic Church of Nicaragua completely disappear, because priests and bishops have neither bowed to the dictatorship nor become accomplices and cronies, as they had hoped.”
She continues: “They do not want prophetic voices who, through the proclamation of the Word and the Gospel, constantly remind them of all the criminal acts that the dictatorship has committed.” So since they have not been able to get bishops and priests to do so , bowing to the dictatorial project, the goal is to destroy Catholicism and create a separate religion in which the gods are Daniel Ortega and his wife.”
The bishops of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua tried to mediate in the socio-political crisis of 2018 and then decided to show solidarity with the victims after the increase in government brutality by police and paramilitary groups. The ruling party did not delay this decision and on July 19, 2018, in the middle of “Operation Cleanup” – as the massacres carried out by the paramilitaries were called – Ortega publicly accused the bishops of being “coup plotters”. Since then, the attacks on the Catholic Church have continued to escalate.
Despite the regime's crusade against Catholicism – the country's main religion – believers continue to attend church regularly. However, there is self-censorship. Molina recognizes that the believers are afraid but have chosen to continue practicing their religion.
“The religious vocations also remain and new priests are constantly being trained. “The dictatorship wanted the parishioners to turn away from the Catholic Church, but they didn't succeed and they won't succeed,” says Molina, who lives in exile.
Terror now reigns among many believers, especially in rural communities. “We don’t know anything about the monsignor [Bishop Isidro del Carmen Mora Ortega] and we fear that they have transferred him to El Chipote prison, and you know: there is torture there,” a woman from the diocese of Siuna, who does not want to give her name, tells EL PAÍS. “The Sin of the Monsignor,” she continued, referring to Rolando Álvarez, the first bishop sentenced to 26 years in prison by the Sandinista regime. “He said that the bishops of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference prayed for Bishop Álvarez and the day after, well, they kidnapped him. The government doesn’t want anyone to denounce what is happening to Catholics.”
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