Pope asks Nicaragua government to “coexist with respect” after clashes with Catholic hierarchy and arrest of Bishop of Matagalpa Rolando Álvarez
Francisco I this Sunday expressed his “concern” over the confrontation between the government of Nicaragua and the Catholic Church, the most recent episode of which was the arrest on Friday of the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez. Following Sunday’s Angelus prayer at the Vatican, the Pope said he was “following closely with concern and pain the situation that has arisen in Nicaragua involving people and institutions” and expressed his “hope that through open dialogue and sincere, the basis for a respectful and peaceful coexistence can still be found.
The bishop, a critic of President Daniel Ortega, was arrested at the Curia’s headquarters in Matagalpa and transferred to his residence in Managua, where he remains under house arrest and is accused of supporting “destabilizing and provocative” activities. The arrest caused a strong alarm in the ecclesiastical circles of the country as police broke into the episcopal palace “with all the luxury of violence” and the prelate was forcibly introduced in a car that left “with an unknown direction,” sources said. Catholics.
Along with Álvarez, 55, the security forces arrested seven other people: three priests, two seminarians, a reporter and the rector of John Paul II University, Ramiro Tijerino. They had all been in the episcopal see for thirteen days, along with three other people, in a situation of practical confinement since the Sandinista police prevented them from taking to the streets.
A priest reported this Saturday that after several hours in an unknown whereabouts, the church was able to verify that Rolando Álvarez was arrested at his parents’ home in the capital and that he was in a “deteriorated physical condition”. The government accuses him of organizing “violent groups” to “destabilize the state”. The bishop denounced the closure of five Catholic radio stations in early August. The Bishops’ Conference of Venezuela and Panama this Sunday denounced that “religious freedom in Nicaragua is in danger”.
In a country where the Catholic community represents nearly 60% of its 6.5 million inhabitants, the tension between the executive and the church has not gone unnoticed. It is also not that it is an important element for the stability of the state and, even more so, at a time when the cabinet of Daniel Ortega is going through a serious crisis in whose spiral the president has also attacked the unrelated media and the NGO . The controversial November elections, in which he was re-elected to a fifth term, with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice president, appear to have taken a heavier toll on the former Sandinista leader than expected. It lacks the recognition of the West. The Organization of American States has demanded that he “end the harassment” of the church, the press and civil society organizations, in addition to releasing the nearly 200 “political prisoners” imprisoned for their dissent. For this reason, the government has also entered into the OAS. The regime has expelled its representatives from the country and withdrew its ambassadors from this body. Ortega’s international labyrinth is big, very big.
At the domestic level, with the opposition previously imprisoned, the persecution of dissidents and the legal maneuvers to allow for another successive re-election, Ortega has turned to an authoritarian patrimonial regime closer to ancient Somocism than to a social revolution. Added to this is a deep economic crisis, which led to mass popular protests in 2018 for social security reform. The president called the demonstrations a coup. The repression by the security forces (to which the hooded paramilitary attacks were added) caused at least 328 deaths, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, although some Nicaraguan NGOs estimate the tragedy at 684 dead.
Ortega has branded Catholic leaders as “terrorists” and justified his actions against them with arguments such as that the bishops gave him an “ultimatum” amid those protests to leave power. He sees in the Curia a growing rival to whom he lacks the same reach as his political opponents. Some have been imprisoned and others forced into exile.
But there is also a background situation. The opposition in the Central American country is distinguished by its ideological plurality and a political project based solely on the reaction to the excesses of the president. For example, last Thursday more than 20 organizations, some of them in exile, called on Nicaraguan officials to “lose their fear of the government”. However, they suffer from the lack of a common economic program and political harmony to show the population. And in this context, many citizens prefer to stick with the bad before risking the unknown; those who survive the crisis simply because they do and those who are doomed to poverty because they believe that uncertainty and instability in the face of a model they have known for decades can exacerbate their circumstances.
To this must be added the constant blows of the regime against the adversaries; the last of these happened last July when Ortega arbitrarily took over the mayorships of five major municipalities from the opposition. In the midst of all this storm, the Catholic Church is the only institution in the country that has become a social and even political benchmark for citizens.
An example of the increasing deterioration between the two institutions is the expulsion so far this year of the Apostolic Nuncio Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag and twenty nuns, many of whom arrived as missionaries in Nicaragua, the imprisonment of three priests and the closure of successive series of Catholic radio stations. . and television stations. In addition, on August 13, the government banned the Archdiocese of Managua from the procession with the pilgrim statue of the Virgin of Fatima; a transcendental ceremony for the Catholic community as it marked the end of a two and a half year pilgrimage through Nicaragua of a replica of the traditional image kept in its sanctuary in Portugal to commemorate the end of the Jubilee.
While a strong police cordon prevented the celebration, thousands of people attended mass prior to the procession, where even another replica was delivered to be sent to the detained bishop of Matagalpa as a clear challenge to the executive and especially Rosario Murillo. Ortega’s wife has been the biggest plague of the country’s priests since the 2018 protests; as well as so many other confrontations that increasingly leave the cabinet alone in its labyrinth.
Source: La Verdad
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