Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega’s regime has reportedly ordered all remaining nuns to leave the country by the end of the year. This is the latest in the government’s unrelenting attack on the local Catholic Church.
Nicaragua’s government issued an ultimatum to the country’s remaining religious sisters, ordering them to leave by December amid the ongoing persecution of the Catholic Church, according to a lawyer and researcher specialising in corruption and the rule of law in the Central American nation.
“You have until December to leave the country,” is what the nuns were told, according to Nicaraguan lawyer Martha Patricia Molina from her exile in Texas. Molina documented the attacks on the Catholic Church in her report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?” The report stated that attacks include “hostilities, persecution, sieges, desecration, destruction, robbery, expulsions, and confiscations” perpetrated by President Daniel Ortega and outlines a meticulous study of each hostile action from April 2018 to 2023.
“The nuns have already been banned from working in non-profit organizations, now all their property is being confiscated, and most of them have already left Nicaragua,” said Molina, explaining that many sisters will now seek refuge in Latin American nations where their congregations already work.
Targeting nuns has long been a modus operandi of the Ortega regime in its persecution of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, where Catholics make up for 58.5 percent of the 6.5 million inhabitants. Earlier, the Ortega regime had expelled the Missionaries of Charity – the congregation Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta founded – accusing the nuns who work for the poorest of the poor in the country since 1988 of “money laundering, financing of terrorism and financing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Ongoing repression
This latest move against the nuns comes soon after the November 13 arrest and expulsion of Bishop Carlos Enrique Herrera Gutiérrez of Jinotega, president of the Bishops’ Conference of Nicaragua, and the ban on Catholic priests from carrying out their ministry to the sick in public hospitals.
Following the expulsion of the apostolic nuncio in 2022, Bishop Rolando Alvarez as well as other priests were deported to the Vatican in January 2024. Between April 2018 and August of this year, 245 clergy were forced into exile or expelled, according to Molina.
The powerful Catholic Church has for some time been at loggerheads with Ortega’s regime. Ortega, a one-time Marxist guerrilla, ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990 without interruption and returned to power in 2007. Rosario Murillo, the First Lady and Ortega’s wife, has been the country’s vice president since 2017. Ortega has attacked the Catholic Church and priests who criticize the regime’s repression, crimes, and violations of rights and freedoms and because bishops have exhorted people “to exercise their right to peacefully demonstrate on the basis of civic and evangelical values”.
Pope Francis’ support
On December 2, Pope Francis chose the celebration of the novena of the Immaculate Conception to send a pastoral letter offering encouragement in faith and solidarity to Catholics in Nicaragua. “For some time, I have wanted to write you a pastoral letter to reiterate once again the affection I profess for the Nicaraguan people,” the pope wrote.
In his letter, Pope Francis did not directly reference the political situation but acknowledged the suffering of Catholics in the country: “Precisely in the most difficult moments, when it becomes humanly impossible to understand what God wants from us, we are called not to doubt His care and mercy,” he writes.
The Latin American pope last year compared Ortega’s regime to that of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler as well as the 1917 Communist dictatorship, describing the government as a “rude dictatorship” led by an “unbalanced” president.
Republished with permission from La Croix International.
