Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, Archbishop of Managua, ordered on Saturday, June 7, eight new deacons that will soon be priests, a fact that constitutes a light of hope for Nicaragua before the persecution suffered by the Catholic Church in the country by Daniel Ortega regime and his wife Rosario Murillo.
Before a cathedral crowded with faithful, the cardinal ordered Luis Alfredo Hernández, Kevin Mayorga Silva, Arnold Vasquez Nuñez, Byron Calero Hernández, Jorge Morales Morales, Milton Vivas Velasquez, José Luquez Ortiz and Evaristo Bracamonte Potosme.
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The new deacons were presented to Cardinal Brenes and the faithful present by Fr. Boanerges Carballo, Pastoral Episcopal Vicar, who pointed out, as the rite specifies, that the eight were worthy to receive the diaconal ordination.
“Thanks to the Lord because he has heard us”
“My first feeling is to thank the Lord because he has listened to us, his eminence Cardinal Miguel (Obando) always invited us to pray for the Lord to send to this beloved Church good and holy priests,” Brenes said at the beginning of his homily
“It is very sad, in other sister churches, especially outside of Latin America – of the experience that I have lived these days of the conclave – to listen to bishops who have vocational crises, who have years of bishop without making an ordination and when some publish it with joy and joy: that after 10, 15 years, they order a first priest.”
One of them told him that after 15 years of Archbishop he ordered a priest and thought that “he was going to die without ordering one.”
Brenes was one of the 133 voters who participated in the conclave that on May 8 chose Cardinal Robert Prevost as the successor of San Pedro, who adopted the name of Leo XIV.
The cardinal also encouraged young people to “be afraid to listen to the Lord” and follow the example of a group of 34 that already periodically meets to “discern and respond to the call that God is doing.”
The Archbishop also recalled that, in the parish where he stayed in Rome before the conclave that chose Pope Leo XIV, a redeemer priest commented, in the dialog He wants to give. ”
The service first
“One of the dozens of the Holy Rosary I always offer it by vocations. Lord, I do not ask for quantity, but what you send us is of quality. And the quality is demonstrated with the service, as demonstrated in this ordination,” Brenes continued.
The cardinal later said that a diabolical temptation can occur in someone called by God: “The devil can put the idea about what corresponds to me for leaving everything. The Lord always responds: service, that must be the first.”
“Pope Francis gave us an example of closeness, his capacity for service. It is a beautiful message that gave us Holy Thursday: not preside over the Eucharist in his cathedral but to go to a prison and wash the feet of those deprived of liberty.”
Have Christ in the heart
The Archbishop of Managua also recommended to the new deacons “to have Christ in the heart, that he is the center of our lives. That he pushes us and takes us forward.”
After remembering that the ordination was given on the eve of “The beautiful party of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit is sent,” the purple stressed: “The Lord has called them and must always be eternally grateful to their parents and moms, their first vocational promoters. God noticed the belly of his moms and there began the job. We came from very simple homes.”
“If we stop praying we fall into deep spiritual anemia”
To continue his homily, Cardinal Brenes stressed that “prayer must be permanent food. When we stop praying we will fall into a crisis, in a vacuum that does not always let us see Jesus Christ. If we stop praying we fall into a deep spiritual anemia, which can lead us to lose joy.”
After pointing out that the service in the Eucharist is also fundamental, the Cardinal remarked the need to announce the gospel so that it reaches everyone.
“It is important to be a sowing of the Word, that is what we are called. The spirit of the Lord will make it grow. We have to convey the word also through the testimony of our lives. What we announced we have to live it,” he concluded.
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.