Nicaragua once again bans Holy Week processions

ACI Prensa Staff, Apr 15, 2025 / 15:28 pm (CNA).

The dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega and his “co-president” and wife, Rosario Murillo, in Nicaragua has banned, for the third consecutive year, street processions in the country, where the Catholic Church has suffered fierce persecution from the regime for several years.

“Before, we used to go out into the streets and go around the communities, but now we don’t. We have to do it inside the church, and that somewhat diminishes popular religiosity, because people liked the procession. Now, we just pray and read the Stations [of the Cross],” a parishioner named Marcos, who serves at a church in Managua, told the newspaper Confidencial.

Aurelio (first name), 35, pointed out in turn: “We already know who the plainclothes police are. There was a fair recently and we saw them there. They take photos, see who’s there and what’s being done. The priest must provide information.”

According to Confidencial, the dictatorship is supposedly deploying 14,000 police officers to prevent processions during Holy Week in Nicaragua.

At the end of March, Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan researcher and lawyer in exile, explained that there is a “Summer 2025 Plan” for the police, which “includes police harassment and intimidation of priests” to remind them of two orders they must follow to avoid jail: “no authorization to hold processions” and “not to mention anything against the ‘government’ in their homilies and religious activities.”

Molina is the author of the report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church,” which in its latest edition in December 2024 reported nearly 1,000 attacks by the dictatorship against the Catholic Church in the country from 2018 to 2024.

The newspaper Mosaico CSI reported in January that the police are monitoring priests, checking their cellphones, and demanding weekly reports on their activities in addition to restricting their freedom of movement. They even interrogated a schoolgirl on her way to church.

In a statement to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Molina said: “Some parishes have obtained permission, but only to hold the procession in front of them. That is, they come out, are on the street in front of the parish for a short while, and then go in procession toward the main altar. It’s not that they’re going to walk through all the streets, as was customary in previous years when religious freedom was respected in Nicaragua.”

“Judeas [theatrical representations of the passion and death of Christ] are also being banned. In fact, the Sandinista police recently went to intimidate minors so they wouldn’t participate in these activities, which are more common in the country’s interior. They threatened them, telling them not to go out, that it was prohibited,” Molina reported.

“The police no longer have any qualms; they enter churches armed to monitor people, to take photos and videos, and the Church continues to suffer from this siege and persecution by the dictatorship,” she said.

Dictatorship powerless against the risen Christ

On Palm Sunday, Silvio Báez, a Nicaraguan bishop in exile, wrote on X that “the dictatorship of #Nicaragua has banned street processions. What they will not be able to prevent is the Crucified One from revealing his victory in every struggle for truth and justice, in every effort to defend people’s dignity, and in every act of solidarity for the victims.”

On April 13, Father Nils Hernández, an exiled Nicaraguan priest who works at Queen of Peace Parish in the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, stated that “Jesus is going to overthrow those dictators who have stolen Nicaragua as if it were their own country estate. God sees the suffering of his people, and God does not abandon Nicaragua, even though the co-dictators [Ortega and Murillo] think they will continue to triumph.”

“Despite the religious persecution launched by the Ortega regime against the Church in #Nicaragua, Catholics are attending the country’s parishes en masse at the beginning of #SemanaSanta 2025 [Holy Week],” said Nicaraguan journalist Israel Espinoza, who is exiled in Spain.

“The faith of Nicaraguan Christians is worthy of admiration and solidarity,” he added.

Father Edwing Román, another exiled priest, wrote on X that “in Nicaragua, nothing is normal. I know of some parishes where police remain inside the church, recording homilies, and they ask to take a picture with the priest to commit them to projecting an image, according to la Chayo [Murillo’s nickname], who talks of ‘love and peace.’”

New report details regime’s human rights violations

On April 3, the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua published a report titled “Institutions and Individuals Responsible for the Main Patterns of Human Rights Violations and Abuses and Crimes Committed in Nicaragua Since April 2018,” a 234-page document that provides information on 54 officials it holds responsible.

Félix Maradiaga, a former presidential candidate, political prisoner, and director of the Fundación Libertad, (Freedom Foundation) noted on April 10 in an interview with “EWTN Noticias,” the Spanish-language broadcast edition of EWTN News, that the report details the “bloody role” of these officials, “not only in the 2018 protests but in the subsequent crackdown,” and he called on the international community to support Nicaragua so that “it can at some point have a special court to prosecute these crimes.”

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

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/263393/nicaragua-once-again-bans-holy-week-processions