Human rights defender Bianca Jagger has called upon the Catholic leaders and politicians around the world to speak out forcefully against the persecution of the Church in her native Nicaragua.
Speaking to the Catholic Herald, Miss Jagger, the founder and president of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, and a Catholic, urged the Church to condemn the regime of Daniel Ortega for its arrest and imprisonment of Catholic bishops, priests and laity.
She said the Socialist president of Nicaragua and Rosario Murillo, his vice president wife, was waging a “brutal war” against the Catholic Church because they saw it as the last remaining political opposition to his dictatorship.
Miss Jagger said: “Of course what Ortega and Murillo want is to get rid of all the leaders of the Catholic Church, all the courageous and eloquent leaders.”
“Anyone who has been a grass roots leader or a political leader in Nicaragua who has spoken in defence of human rights and democracy is in jail today,” she continued.
“The strategy is to get rid of any powerful leader or any dissenting voice and the most powerful leaders left in Nicaragua – because the others are in jail or because they have had to flee the country – are the bishops and the priests.
“The Catholic Church is the bastion left in Nicaragua, the people who speaking up for the people, defending human rights and denouncing the atrocities taking place in the country – they are the men of the people.”
She added: “Their appeal goes far – their audience is not just the Catholics in Nicaragua. But the Catholic Church has revived. The people are inspired. The people have become more religious. This is a battle between good and evil … this is more evident than ever.”
She said that it would be tragic for the people of Nicaragua if bishops and priests were forced into exile and said Pope Francis should resist the temptation to agree to their removal from the country.
Instead, she said she believed the Holy Father should speak out forcefully in defence of clerics persecuted for their defence of the poor.
Her comments came the day after security forces in Nicaragua raided the curial offices of the Diocese of Matagalpa to arrest Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa (pictured), an outspoken Catholic critic of human rights abuses.
The bishop had been holed up in the house in the capital Managua for 16 days with 11 other people while police surrounded the building and refused to allow any food or medicines to be taken in.
According to Catholic News Service, the police said their operation, carried out at 3.20am on Friday without arrest warrants, was aimed at “the recuperation of normalcy for Matagalpa’s citizens and families”.
The police have said they are investigating the bishop on suspicion of “trying to organise violent groups, inciting them to execute acts of hate against the population, provoking an environment of chaos and disorder, disturbing the peace and harmony in the community with the objective of destabilising the Nicaraguan state and attacking the constitutional authorities”.
Bishop Álvarez has now been transferred to a house belonging to his relatives where he is being held under arrest. Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes of Managua has been able to visit him there but no-one else has access to him.
Priests and seminarians also removed from the chancery in the raid are, however, being held “in the Directorate of Judicial Assistance”, a prison known as El Chipote and a notorious place of torture of political dissidents.
Pope Francis, who has been under pressure to condemn the attacks by President Ortega against the Church, responded to the raid by using his Sunday Angelus to call for “peaceful coexistence” between people and institutions in Nicaragua
“I am closely following, with worry and sorrow, the situation created in Nicaragua, and which involves people and institutions,” the Holy Father said.
“I want to express my conviction and my wish that through an open and sincere dialogue they can find the basis for a respectful and peaceful coexistence,” he said.
“Let us ask the Lord, through the intercession of Our Lady Most Pure, that he inspire such concrete will in the hearts of all.”
The Pope made no mention of either President Ortega or Bishop Álvarez or suggested how such dialogue might take place.
The Vatican’s diplomatic capabilities have been limited by the expulsion in March of the apostolic nuncio in Nicaragua, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, which caused “surprise and pain” to the Holy See.
Yet according to Catholic News Agency, since 2018 there have been more than 190 attacks against the Church, its bishops, priests, faithful, and houses of worship.
Citing a report by Martha Patricia Molina Montenegro, a member of the Pro-Transparency and Anti-Corruption Observatory, it said Ortega has repeatedly insulted Catholic bishops and priests, calling them “demons in cassocks,” “terrorists” and “coup plotters.”
Several clerics, including a bishop have been forced into exile and in July the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by St Teresa of Calcutta, was also expelled from the country.
Catholic television and radio stations have also been closed down as part of a campaign against the media in general.
President Ortega has often been antagonistic toward to the Catholic Church. He first came to power as the leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Marxist guerrillas who emerged victorious from a brief civil war against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Throughout the 1980s, he attempted to export revolution to neighbouring El Salvador, which prompted Ronald Reagan to sponsor the anti-Sandinista “Contra” guerrillas, and also clashed with Pope St John Paul II.
More than any other country in Latin America, Nicaragua was “a laboratory for the various liberation theologies’ claims” and ahead of the Pope’s visit to Nicaragua in 1983, Ortega personally intimidated the papal nuncio, once driving up to the nunciature in a red sports car followed by jeeps of heavily armed soldiers.
For the papal Mass in Managua, icons of Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary heroes were cleaned up and placed in proximity to the altar, and the closest blocks of seats were packed with Sandinista supporters.
During the homily, when St John Paul spoke about the impossibility of a “popular Church” replacing the authentic pastors, the mob arranged in front of the altar attempted to drown him out.
Engineers turned down the Pope’s microphone and turned up microphones placed among the agitators until finally John Paul was compelled to restore order by shouting “silencio!” over the heckling.
The treatment of the Pope spectacularly backfired as a political manoeuvre, leaving many throughout Latin America shocked by the cynical vulgarity of Ortega’s regime.
John Paul caused further embarrassment to the President when he was photographed speaking to Fr Ernesto Cardenal, ordering him to regularise his position in the Church after his refusal to give up political office at the behest of the bishops.
Tensions deepened the following year when Fr Cardenal, a poet and Marxist liberation theology activist as well as Minister for Culture, was suspended by the Pope a divinis for holding a cabinet position in violation of canon law.
Pope Francis later absolved all canonical censures imposed on Fr Cardenal and readmitted him to the exercise of the priestly ministry.
But Ortega has nonetheless stepped up his harassment of the Church in recent years, and has been deliberately engaging in and encouraging the intimidation of the clergy.
Such acts also include churches being shot at and clergy assaulted as well as death threats issued against bishops, especially Auxiliary Bishop Silvio Jose Baez of Managua, who had denounced state repression on social media and was threatened with reprisals so worrying that he was called to Rome.
The regime created such difficulties as depriving the Church of communion wine by holding imports at borders and preventing Caritas, the Catholic aid agency, from bringing in food aid and medicine for the poor.
The mounting animosity followed the efforts of the Church to mediate in the national unrest that has claimed more than 300 lives and because of its calls for democratic reforms and for human rights to be upheld.
Ortega eventually agreed to elections in 2021 but he and Murillo cleared the field of opposition by arresting seven other presidential candidates along with 140 politicians, intellectuals, businessmen, former diplomats and journalists. They include former Sandinista rebels who had once fought alongside him.
At the same time, cathedrals and churches were besieged and firebombed, and bishops and clergy depicted as enemies of the people siding with “coup plotters”.
The intimidation of Bishop Baez worried Pope Francis so much that he persuaded the prelate to go into exile in Miami.
From the United States, Bishop Baez continues to rail against Ortega’s regime, calling on the people of Nicaragua to not to be afraid “even if the force of evil seems like an insurmountable storm”.
From within Nicaragua itself the vocal opposition of the Church continued and among the most strident of critics was Bishop Álvarez, who complained that “Nicaragua is bleeding for the suffering of those deprived of their liberty, because of broken families due to forced migration … because of extreme poverty”.
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