Ortega dictatorship in Nicaragua deports group of foreign priests and nuns

“What the dictatorship is doing is suffocating, more and more, the Catholic Church,” says lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina. / Credit: Martha Calderón/EWTN Vatican

Lima Newsroom, Sep 4, 2024 / 17:16 pm (CNA).

Lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina has reported that the dictatorship in Nicaragua of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has deported a group of foreign priests and nuns who were working in the Central American country.

“There were two meetings. It seems they were summoned [to appear] from different congregations or from different parts of the country. All the priests and religious who attended were foreigners. During the time they were in that ‘trap’ they were shown an indoctrination video of the dictatorial couple,” Molina explained in an interview with the Spanish-language edition of EWTN News.

The lawyer is the author of the report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?”, which in its fifth installment released Aug. 15 cites 870 attacks by the Nicaraguan dictatorship against the Catholic Church since 2018, the year there were widespread demonstrations against the authoritarian regime and its unpopular proposed reforms. 

Molina also explained that the religious men and women were threatened with imprisonment or deportation if they said or did anything that the dictatorship might consider hostile.

“I had information that some of the religious were deported from the country and were also prohibited from speaking out because there are some religious, from those same congregations who remain in the country and [can’t say anything either]: They are under constant threat from the dictatorship,” she reported.

Retirement fund for Catholic priests confiscated

Molina also referred to the regime’s move to cancel 1,500 nonprofit organizations or nongovernmental organizations, including hundreds of Catholic and evangelical organizations, and even the priests’ retirement fund that had existed for 24 years and that had been frozen by the dictatorship last year.

“This seriously harms sick and retired priests and also robs us laypeople and the Catholic Church, who had constantly contributed to this fund to later on [be able to] maintain their health and also give some assistance — which they well deserve — to retired priests,” the researcher in exile explained to EWTN News.

“It’s just the way the Sandinistas do things: They steal everything, they make everything disappear and use it for the party’s own benefit, and also to continue using it for repression. This is something that the Church is not going to get back,” she said.

In addition to the taxes on assets and charitable donations passed by the legislature on Aug. 22, and with the cancellation of the priests’ retirement fund, “what the dictatorship is doing is suffocating, more and more, the Catholic Church, since, with all the attacks it has committed, it has not been able to make the Catholic faith and religion completely disappear from Nicaragua, which is what they want,” Molina said.

Catholic schools affected

In this wave of closures of nonprofit organizations, “countless religious schools belonging to different orders were also affected … These schools, since 2020, have had their savings accounts confiscated, frozen by the dictatorship,” Molina denounced.

An egregious example, the Central American University (UCA) of the Jesuits, was confiscated in 2023 and hasn’t been operational again to this day as the Nicaraguan dictatorship doesn’t know “what it’s going to do with all these schools, which are close to being confiscated, because they won’t be able to administer them.”

“For the moment,” Molina pointed out, “they have the nuns, the brothers in charge of the schools, but they have threatened them, telling them that all the money they get from paying tuition will go to the coffers of the Sandinista Front and also that they will have permanent surveillance regarding education.”

“To date they have not taken the schools from them, but it is in fact in the law that all those assets will go to the state,” she warned.

The decision to cancel the 1,500 organizations was announced through ministerial agreement 38-2024-OSFL, published on Aug. 19 in the official government newspaper La Gaceta and signed by the head of the Ministry of the Interior of Nicaragua, María Amelia Coronel Kinloch.

The text states that the attorney general’s office must transfer the liquid and fixed assets of all these organizations “to the title of the State of Nicaragua.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.