Bishop Báez de Nicaragua shares on Good Friday 2025 a message of hope to 7 years of protests

Bishop Silvio Báez shared, from exile, a message of hope this Good Friday, 7 years after the protests of April 2018 in Nicaragua, brutally repressed by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife and “co -president” Rosario Murillo, who has undertaken a fierce persecution against the Catholic Church in the Central American country.

“Love was crucified to present at all crosses and in all the crucified world”, Wrote the auxiliary bishop of Managua in his X account this April 18.

“Now we know that God is in our solitudes and pains, he loves us without measure, he cries with the poor and the victims doing justice, and hugs us in our death,” said the prelate that lives in exile since 2019.

Mons. Báez, then citing a passage from his homily today, also wrote that the victory of Jesus crucified “is present in each act of charity and solidarity, in each victory of truth and justice and in Each effort to defend the dignity of people”.

Remembering what happened in April 2018, the bishop stressed that “although from that moment on, violence and repression were imposed, that same day Nicaragua began the way to freedom, justice and democracy”.

In April 2018, the reform of the health and pension system raised protests throughout the country, which were brutally repressed by the police. In them, bishops and priests received death threats. According to the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), 328 people were killed.

Báez also recalled today that on April 18, 2018, Báez He published a tweet – That he maintains all his actuality – in which he asked “Daniel Ortega and his wife to stop violence and repression. Do not endanger the peace of the country! Know listening, dialogue, have the maturity of rectifying so many mistakes for the good of Nicaragua. Be sensible!”.

As part of the current persecution of the regime against the Catholic Church, for the third consecutive year it has banned processions in the streets and in this month of April it prevented the return of two priests to the country.

Martha Patricia Molina, author of the report Nicaragua: a persecuted churchhe denounced in his last one the dictatorship has made almost 1,000 attacks against the Catholic Church between 2018 and 2024.

UN Report on Nicaragua

On April 3, the group of human rights experts on Nicaragua published the report entitled Institutions and people responsible for the main patterns of human rights violations and abuses and crimes perpetrated in Nicaragua since April 2018a text that gives information about 54 officials.

Félix Maradiaga, a political express and director of the Libertad Foundation, said April 10, in Interview with Ewtn News That the report details the “bloody role” of those officials, “not only in the protests of 2018, but in subsequent repression”, and launched a call to the international community, to accompany Nicaragua, so that “a special court can have at some point to pursue these crimes.”

After the report was disseminated, Bishop Báez said, about the aforementioned officials that “each of them must be processed and pay for their crimes”.