Magda Lanuza, 31 August 2022
In early August another international campaign against Nicaragua was launched, this time alleging persecution of the Catholic Church. All the major world media—including Catholic and not so Catholic ones—have run the same headlines. They impose their media narrative without bothering with the truth or history, typical of these post-truth times. They have circulated photos and videos of the burning of churches that occurred in Chile in 2019 and 2020, unleashing prayer chains. There has been no shortage of homilies from grandiose pulpits or ecclesiastical pronouncements. There are even some who have dared to compare Bishop Álvarez with the great Saint Romero of the Americas, who was assassinated in 1980 in El Salvador. What this Nicaraguan bishop actually did was show his true colors when obliged to pay taxes for the seven media outlets he manages: he again called for an uprising of the people, went into the street with the Body of Christ in hand, and is now under house arrest. These recent events indicate that there is a lot to sort out in this tale. We see an institutional church engaging in outright political activity, without limits and far removed from the cause of the Gospel, but very useful to the efforts to destabilize a nation facing larger challenges.
The violent events of 2018 left clear evidence against the Catholic Church hierarchy. Three of the eight bishops serving in Nicaragua that year—Silvio Báez, Abelardo Mata, and Rolando Álvarez—placed themselves at the forefront of a revolt whose only objective was to overthrow President Daniel Ortega who had been elected in 2016. To this end they got together with old friends, some NGOs, some media, university leaders, and even some figures of dubious reputation and origin.1 Now, four years later, the only one of them still active in Nicaragua is Álvarez. Báez was recalled to Rome after more than half a million Catholics petitioned to remove him from Nicaragua; he is now well situated in Miami. And one year ago, Monsignor Mata resigned as bishop of Estelí and went home. But in late 2021, Álvarez gained more power and more resources upon becoming bishop of both Estelí and Matagalpa. That is why the international media talk about persecution and call, once again, for the end of the elected government.
The political activism of the hierarchy has caused it to lose its bearings. This originated with the Nicaraguan Church hierarchy’s vision of power that led it to collude with far-right economic groups to repudiate Liberation Theology. The Second Conference of Latin American Bishops held in Medellín, Colombia in 1968 (CELAM II) said that the Church should take a “preferential option for the poor.”2 This was the beginning of a Church in the Americas that would break from its pro-Conquistador colonial past and move towards a Christian approach to liberation. This theology is expressed in the Christian Base Communities and in a commitment to defend life in which faith and the struggle for social justice are inseparable. That spirit of a committed Church found fertile ground in a Nicaragua that was oppressed, repressed, and dominated by the dictator Somoza. Christians then united for justice until liberation was achieved in 1979. The revolutionary Nicaraguan government included some ministers of God and ministers of the people, as they were described by Father Claretiano Teófilo Cabestrero.3 But the revolution also confronted a poorly committed clergy that channeled resources and energy into vilifying those who embraced the preferential option for the poor that was espoused in Medellín—a liberating God whose roots can be found in the Book of Exodus.
This is the historical context in which we should recall the visits to Nicaragua of the Spanish/Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga—the ecclesiastical figure who came to symbolize commitment to the poor of Brazil and Latin America.4 The arrival of Fr. Pedro infuriated the institutional Church at the time. He first arrived in 1985 with the support of 23 other bishops who had joined the fast and prayer for peace convened by Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister, Fr. Miguel d’Escoto. Next, Casaldáliga visited El Salvador and kneeled before the tomb of the man who is now Saint Romero, his dear friend. These visits were a great source of consolation, evangelization, and true encounters with Nicaragua’s Catholic communities that had never seen any contradiction between their faith and the Sandinista Revolution. But that was not what it meant to the Bishops’ Conference of Nicaragua. They interpreted it as meddling and a threat to their position. They never met with their fellow bishop during his visits of 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. In 1988 Fr. Casaldáliga traveled to Rome for the first time after having sent a letter about the bloodletting of the Nicaraguan people. But he was met by Cardenal Gantin, head of the Congregation for Bishops, who scolded and questioned him because the Nicaraguan bishops had misinformed Pope John Paul II. Earlier, in 1983, the bishops of Nicaragua celebrated the punishment and censuring of the Christian Base Communities and their three brothers of the cloth—Ernesto Cardenal, Fernando Cardenal, and Miguel d’Escoto. The clergy excluded and rejected these men because they chose to serve the people by heading government ministries.
While the Nicaraguan hierarchy behaved this way in the 1980s, in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras the Church paid a very high price for its commitment to the poorest of the poor. Those being persecuted in the civil wars—women, children, Indigenous peoples, trade unionists and laypersons—found protection in the Church as it allowed them to escape the death, forced disappearances, torture, and ethnic cleansing of the day. In those countries the Church played a totally different, committed role. In Guatemala, 14 priests and one bishop were murdered for doing their job. Among them was Father Stanley Francisco Rother who was assassinated by the army in 1981 while inside Santiago Atitlán Church because he was taking in Tzutuhil Indigenous people who had been impoverished and excluded, leaving them illiterate and undernourished. In 1998 Bishop Girardi was assassinated just two days after submitting a report advocating for the recovery of historical memory, called “Guatemala: Never Again.” El Salvador got the worst of it, with the massacre of 12 priests and hundreds of lay people. The army’s slogan was, “Be a patriot—kill a priest.” The first was Father Rutilio Grande who was murdered alongside two laypersons in March of 1977. In March of 1980 they assassinated Bishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero while he was saying the Holy Mass, and that same year they raped and killed four nuns from the United States. In 1989 they assassinated six Jesuit priests, of Spanish and Salvadoran nationality, at the Central American University. In Honduras, Father Guadalupe Carney was disappeared in 1983.5 Over the past 50 years, the Church in Nicaragua never experienced such hardship. The only lives lost were those of Mary and Felipe Barreda, a lay couple from the Christian Base Communities that were brutally murdered by the Contras in 1982.6 The Church hierarchy in Nicaragua said anything on their behalf, not even a prayer.
The martyrdom of a Church made flesh has no parallels in the Nicaraguan clergy. Although there have been some valiant exceptions—some of them still living like Fr. Uriel Molina and Fr. Antonio Castro—most bishops distanced themselves from the people in their martyrdom, along with any commitment to the poor or work for peace and dialogue. This is illustrated in the 13 July 2022 interview that Cardenal Leopoldo Brenes gave on his visit to Bogotá.7 He said, “Liberation Theology was an ideology and the people’s church collapsed because of it.” In Nicaragua, the teachings of Liberation Theology and the Preferential Option for the Poor established in Medellín never even occurred to the bishops over the past 50 years, and today they are proud of that fact. Monsignor Romero, paraphrasing Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, used to say, “The glory of God is that the poor person lives.” But in Nicaragua in the 1980s, when 80% of the population was Catholic, the bishops left the people alone to bury their dead. By 2020 only 42.9% of the population considered itself Catholic.8 It does not suffice to wear jeans, long hair, and sandals to be a believable and committed priest; a monk’s robe does not make you a monk.
In conclusion, it takes a lot of humility and truth to respond to the call for dialogue and coexistence that the Pope has again called for in Nicaragua.9 The Nicaraguans living in the country today enjoy religious freedom in all its expressions; there has been no damage or attacks on a single church. Such facts make it urgent for the hierarchy to get back on the path to the Kingdom of God.
Notes
1 Larcom, Barbara. Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup? Nicaragua 2018—Myths and Facts, p. 39 https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.230/jwp.e46.myftpupload.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/07/live_from_nicaragua_june_2019.pdf
2 Tamayo, Juan José. Amerindia, August 2022 https://amerindiaenlared.org/contenido/21887/pedro-casaldaliga-en-la-senda-de-los-padres-de-la-iglesia-de- america-latina-/
3 Cabestrero, Teófilo. Ministers of God, Ministers of the People, 1983
4 Revista ENVIO, UCA # 83, noviembre de 1988 https://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/2491
5 Radio Progreso https://wp.radioprogresohn.net/36-anos-de-falta-de-verdad-en-la-desaparicion-del-padre- lupe/
6 Bermudez L. Fernando. Religion Digital, 18.02.21 https://www.religiondigital.org/opinion/Felipe-Mary-Eugenia-Barreda-compromiso-Nicaragua- sandinismo_0_2315168505.html
7 https://www.religiondigital.org/el_blog_de_dumar_espinosa/Brenes-Nicaragua- Colombia_7_2474222555.html
8 M&R Consultores, denominada “Nicaragüenses Creencias y Prácticas Religiosas 2020”. https://www.myrconsultores.com/nicaraguenses-creencias-y-practica-religiosas/
9 https://www.religiondigital.org/fe_y_vida/Iglesia-fomente-dialogo-encuentro_7_2480521924.html