“We could soon be seeing bishops or priests imprisoned or exiled,” says a Nicaraguan analyst
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Fabián Medina Sánchezfrom Managua, Nicaragua< i class=”i-share-btn twitter”>
Monsignor Rolando Álvarez remains in “prayer and indefinite fasting” so that the police persecution he suffers ceases. EFE Photo Jorge Torres
In a chapel of the Matagalpa Seminary, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez prays and has been fasting indefinitely from “water and serum” since last Thursday, May 19. He will keep him, as he announced, “until the police siege” that he suffers ends.
Álvarez is bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa and apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Estelí, and one of the strongest voices of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua in the demand for respect for citizen rights.
“Today I have been persecuted all day by the Sandinista police, from morning until late at night. At all times, during all my movements of the day”, he denounced on Thursday through a video broadcast on social networks, while taking refuge in the Santo Cristo church, in Las Colinas, Managua, which was immediately surrounded by patrols and police officers.
This Monday morning, however, the priest managed to leave and return to Matagalpa, according to an effort that Catholic leaders would have carried out with the Nicaraguan Police, reported the magazine Confidencial. And on Tuesday he officiated a mass for the ordination of priests in the northern municipality of San José de Cusmapa.
During the journey from Managua to Matagalpa, about 130 kilometers, the bishop was escorted by police patrols that installed a new fence in the Seminary and the Curia of that city. “Mons. Rolando Álvarez was transferred to Matagalpa under heavy police deployment, they did not let him enter his church, he had to go to the seminary, the ORMU regime has violated his right to free mobilization. Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH).
The The siege against Monsignor Álvarez is part of the registered intensification of the repression of the Catholic Church by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who has blamed the religious for the citizen protests in 2018 against his regime, which he describes as a “coup d’état” and “terrorism”.
One day after Álvarez announced his fast, the regime ordered all the country’s cable companies, through the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and Post Office (Telcor), to take Canal Católico off their grills,without any explanation. p>
Simultaneously, the regime installed a police fence around the San Juan Bautista church, from Masaya, a city 30 kilometers from Managua. The parish priest of the church, Harving Padilla, denounced that he was not allowed to leave, that police and paramilitaries insulted him from the street and there was at least one attempt to arrest him at a time when he wanted to go out into the street.“At that moment, a Hilux truck came with riot gear and one of them asked me what I was going to do, where I was going. I’m just going to deliver the altar boy, I can give it, yes he told me, but I see him immediately coming and weighing himself towards me and I managed to close the gate,” the father reported to the information portal 100 por Cent Noticias. p>
This Tuesday a delegation of priests guarded the exit of Father Padilla from the besieged church and, unofficially, it was learned that he would be designated by the Archdiocese of Managua to another parish in the country for his protection.
Also this week it was learned that the Mayor’s Office of Managua, demanded from the Catholic school, Preparatorio San Agustín, in Managua, more than five million córdobas (about 140 thousand dollars) in taxes and before that, the National Assembly approved a report that proposes, among other things, to prosecute priests, extend sentences and confiscate assets of those who are guilty of the crime of “treason against the country”, in the next reforms to the Penal Code.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Oacnudh) considered in a tweet that “The police siege of the priests of the Catholic Church confirms that in #Nicaragua no one is free from the incessant persecution of divergence, of the demand for justice and, now, of pastoral work. Freedom of religion is added to restricted #HR.”
From 2018 to date, at least 190 attacks on the Catholic Church in Nicaragua have been recorded , according to an account by the researcher Martha Molina, in the report titled “Nicaragua: a persecuted church”, updated until this Monday, May 22.
In July 2020, a fire in a chapel of the Managua cathedral burned the image of the Blood of Christ, one of the religious symbols most revered by Catholics in Nicaragua. (Photo The Press)
The report registers one by one the violent acts that the Nicaraguan church has had to face due to its critical position with the authoritarian drift that the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has taken. Physical attacks on priests, desecration of temples and religious images, siege, death threats, persecution and insults, armed attacks and burnings, are part of the repertoire exposed by Molina.
The lawyer acknowledges that the 2018 protests marked a way of relating between the regime and the Catholic Church. “Before April 2018, the attacks on the church were sporadic. After that date, hostilities increased and escalated. The offensive and threatening language of the presidential couple against the Catholic hierarchy became increasingly evident and frequent; and the actions of some public institutions against the charitable work of the church increased,” says Molina.
The rhythm of the attacks on the church is set by the speeches of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who went from asking them to be witnesses and mediators in the dialogue with the opposition, in 2018, to holding them responsible for the violence and disaster that the country experiencedwhen the regime decided to dismantle the protests by shooting to kill, and to placate the opposition and claims by arresting the main opponents and people critical of its administration.
According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR ), 355 people died as a result of the repression against citizen protests, and there are currently more than 180 political prisoners in the regime’s prisons.
In February of 2020, Rosario Murillo accused the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church of blessing what she described as “criminal terrorism” and of carrying out “manipulation of the faith“. “The sound of the bells on the fly will never be erased, curiously, calling to kill us,” said Murillo despite the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) appointed by the IACHR to investigate the violent acts in Nicaragua during 2018, pointed out of perpetrating crimes of against humanity against the Nicaraguan regime, paramilitaries and the Police.
Daniel Ortega, for his part, called the religious “Pharisees” in August 2021.“Christ called them Pharisees when he found them in the temple and whipped them out. The Pharisees have not disappeared, they are well dressed talking as if they were saints, and what is found is filth, where there is no respect for Christ, no respect for God,” he said on that occasion.
“Didn’t some of them set fire to the citizens who were murdered, tortured or to the policemen who were tortured and then burned alive, with the applause and encouragement of some priests who are children of the devil, they are not children of God? Those priests are children of the devil!” he added.
A Nicaraguan analyst consulted by Infobae and who for security reasons asks that his identity be protected, says that the regime “is testing how far it can go with the Church. The tone and actions are rising to find out how far the Church can stand, and if they feel that there are no major consequences, we would soon be seeing bishops or priests imprisoned or exiled.”
The persecuted priests They have received ample solidarity from the parishioners who have organized prayer chains and some discreet public demonstration of support, because the police state that exists in Nicaragua prevents protest demonstrations. The bishops of Panama and Costa Rica have called for an end to the persecution against their fellow believers. And the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua issued a statement in solidarity with Bishop Álvarez.