Nicaragua’s seizure of the Jesuit-run Central American University in Managua on Aug. 16 was only the latest episode in the government’s five-year campaign to silence the Catholic Church.
Described by President Daniel Ortega’s regime as a “center of terrorism” for having attempted to shield student protesters during widespread anti-government demonstrations in 2018, the university has had its buildings, bank accounts and even its furniture seized. If past practice is any guide, it will soon be either shuttered or run by the state, with faculty and curriculums censored by the Sandinista government.
Since 2018, Catholic priests and laity critical of the government have been harassed, exiled, imprisoned, tortured and murdered. The regime has shut down more than 700 nonprofits and nongovernmental agencies, including the Catholic charity Caritas and the Red Cross.
This year, the government prohibited more than 1,000 Catholic processions during Lent and Easter. Priests were barred from anointing the sick, conducting baptisms and celebrating Mass. Even saying the rosary is now considered a subversive act in Nicaragua.
In February, Bishop Rolando Alvarez was arrested and sentenced to 26 years in prison for “anti-government activities” after he criticized the regime’s closure of Catholic radio and television stations. The religious order of nuns founded by Mother Teresa has been expelled from the country.
Prior to the seizure of Central American University, the government took control of two other Catholic universities — Universidad Juan Pablo II and Universidad Cristiana Autónoma de Nicaragua — and rescinded the accreditation of La Purísima Catholic Seminary in Managua. In all, over the past several years, the government has taken over 13 universities for being critical of the regime.
Some reprisals can be petty. Father Rafael Aragón, a Spanish Dominican friar who had lived in Nicaragua for 40 years, was barred from reentering the country after a 2022 trip abroad. This month, two popular pastors returning from Pope Francis’s World Youth Day in Lisbon were also denied reentry. And, in July, Ortega’s socialist regime cut off pensions to elderly Catholic priests.
In the most recent edition of her series of reports on the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, exiled civil rights lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina documented 529 attacks over the past five years — 90 so far this year. Why? “Because the Catholic Church is the last [independent] bastion left in Nicaragua”, Molina said in a recent interview. The regime, she said, “took the media, the institutions, the political parties and the NGOs. So the only space left is the Church”. She said the government “intends to eradicate the Church completely, so that the prophetic voice of the gospel is not heard by the Nicaraguan people”.
No wonder the pope, who normally refrains from caustic characterizations, said of Ortega: “I have no other choice but to think that the person in power is mentally unbalanced”. In a March interview with an Argentine publication, Francis accused the Ortega regime of melding Leninism and Hitlerian fascism. It is a “crass dictatorship”, he said.
The State Department describes conditions in Nicaragua as “an ongoing sociopolitical crisis [that] began in April 2018 when regime-controlled police violently crushed a peaceful student protest”. Since those crackdowns, the government has gone on to kill at least 325 people, imprison hundreds, injure thousands and exile more than 100,000.
In response, the United States imposed economic sanctions. Five hundred of the regime’s officials, including Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have been declared persona non grata. But the repressions continue.
Ortega’s attempt to extinguish Catholicism in Nicaragua merits world condemnation on a much larger, and louder, scale. As the president of a Catholic university, I am especially eager to rally university leaders in opposition to this persecution. But leaders from all walks of life should be condemning Ortega in the harshest terms. His regime should be isolated as an international pariah for trying to “disappear” Catholicism, freedom of worship and free speech.
The Rev. John I. Jenkins is president of the University of Notre Dame.