Pope Leo XIV received this Saturday in the Vatican to the banished president of the bishops of Nicaragua, Mons. Carlos Enrique Herrera Gutiérrez, who was expelled from the Central American country for the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in November 2024.
The Vatican Press Office announced the information by pointing out that “the Holy Father has received this morning at Audience to Se. Carlos Enrique Herrera Gutiérrez, Ofm, Bishop of Jinotega (Nicaragua).”
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As is usually the case with this type of audiences, the Vatican did not offer more details about the meeting.
Mons. Herrera Gutiérrez is president of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua since 2022 and in 2024, under the intense persecution of the dictatorship of Ortega and his wife and co -president of Rosario Murillo, was expelled from the country after criticizing an orteguista mayor who interrupted a Mass with high volume music, in front of his cathedral.
Aci Press was able to confirm, days after the expulsion of the Bishop of Jinotega that, being Franciscan, had been welcomed by a community of Franciscans in Guatemala.
Nicaragua has nine bishops and four of them live in exile: in addition to Mons. Herrera who were forced to leave the country are Mons. Silvio Báez, auxiliary bishop of Managua; Mons. Rolando Álvarez, Bishop of Matagalpa and Apostolic Administrator of Estelí; and Mons. Isidoro Mora, bishop of Siuna.
In addition, among the many attacks perpetrated by the dictatorship of Ortega and Murillo, in March 2022, the Apostolic Nuncio, Mons. Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag was expelled from Nicaragua. That raised the breakdown of diplomatic relations with the Holy See.
In March 2023, Pope Francis criticized Daniel Ortega harshly, stating that he must suffer from a personal “imbalance”, and compared his regime with the “rude dictatorships” of the early twentieth century.
“I think that Pope León will be a true lion, defender, champion of the faith of the Nicaraguan people, with the strength of a lion and with the humility of a lamb,” said Arturo McFields Yescas, an exembujator of Nicaragua before the OAS and today exiled for denouncing the exile of the dictatorship.
While so far Pope Leo XIV has not publicly spoken over Nicaragua, McFields commented that “there is a lot of hope” because despite the attacks without barracks of the dictatorship, “faith is still free and is still strengthened in the midst of persecution.”
One of the last attacks of the regime has been the confiscation of the emblematic San José College in Jinotepe, made by Martha Patricia Molina, Nicaraguan lawyer and researcher in exile, such as “an infamy for religious freedom.”
Molina is the author of the report Nicaragua: a persecuted churchwhich in its last edition accounts for almost 1,000 attacks of the dictatorship against the Church. He recently announced that he will soon announce the seventh edition of it.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.