Nicaraguan bishop Mons. Silvio Báez encouraged the faithful to pray for Cardinal Baltazar Porras and the Church in Venezuela, after the cardinal was prevented from celebrating Mass in the hometown of San José Gregorio Hernández on Sunday, October 26.
“Let us pray especially for the Church of Venezuela. We all know the moment that is being experienced in this beloved country, but this weekend something happened that should awaken our attention and our solidarity towards this sister Church of Venezuela,” said the prelate in the homily of the Mass he celebrated on Sunday at the Saint Agatha Church in Miami, where he currently resides.
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Báez said that Porras “is a personal friend of mine and that he loves my country, Nicaragua very much,” who “was prevented in a thousand ways by the regime from going to celebrate the Eucharist in the hometown and sanctuary of the new Venezuelan saint, the doctor San José Gregorio.”
In his opinion, what happened to the cardinal “may be a sign of a new wave of repression in another country of these regimes that (…) believe themselves to be divine and immortal.”
Cardinal Porras denounced through his social networks a series of irregularities that prevented him from reaching Isnotú, to celebrate the Mass for the feast of Saint José Gregorio Hernández, canonized by Pope Leo XIV together with Mother Carmen Rendiles on October 19 in the Vatican, thus becoming the first saints of Venezuela.
What was reported by the cardinal aroused the “deep solidarity” of the other bishops of Venezuela, who published a statement on the matter, in which they also made “an urgent and repeated call to all sectors not to use the symbols of faith, popular devotion or the figures of our saints for proselytizing or partisan purposes.”
Reiterating his request to pray for the bishops and the Church in Venezuela, Bishop Báez prayed to God to “protect them, make them strong in faith and that they feel in the moment of difficulty, of persecution by the authoritarian powers of this world your strength and your light.”
Although the bishop’s request was made on Sunday, it retains all its relevance, since yesterday, October 29, Diosdado Cabello, Minister of the Interior and in charge of police and security agencies, dedicated part of his program With the gavel giving on October 29 to attack Cardinal Porras and the other bishops of Venezuela, thus continuing his smear campaign against Venezuelan Catholics, also using videos where the late Hugo Chávez insulted the prelates.
Bishop Báez: Dictatorships practice atheistic religious beliefs
In his homily on Sunday, after reading the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, in which the former despised the latter, the Nicaraguan bishop highlighted that a “social and political reading of this parable can be made, especially if we think about the dictatorial regimes of our countries that continually mention God and invoke his name while they oppress, steal and respect human rights and destroy the future of our people.”
“Like the Pharisee in the parable, these authoritarian regimes, these dictatorships, use religion for themselves, to calm their consciences, to use it as ideological support or to gain the good will of the simple and believing people,” he denounced.
“They invoke God and thank him in open blasphemy for the supposed blessings they receive, which in reality are only the result of their authoritarian and corrupt policies to entrench themselves in power, get richer every day and achieve their own ideological interests,” he continued.
The bishop also said that “like the Pharisee in the parable, the dictators, their relatives and those who support them believe, like the Pharisee, that they are not like the others. They believe they are a privileged and omnipotent caste. They are convinced that they were born to rule, that they are owners of the country and superior to the rest of the society that they subject and attack.”
“They practice an atheistic religiosity. They do not feel the need for God’s mercy nor do they recognize his justice,” he stated.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.