Church in Nicaragua: Priest attacked with acid dies in the Managua Cathedral in 2018

Father Mario de Jesús Guevara Calero (66), spiritual director of the La Purísima Archdiocesan Major Seminarydied on Sunday, October 12, according to the Archdiocese of Managua.

Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, Archbishop of Managua, and the priests of the Nicaraguan capital “send their condolences to his family, to the seminary community and to the parishioners that he served for years in various parishes of our archdiocese,” notes a mourning note of the Catholic Church.

On December 5, 2018, when the priest was confessing in the Managua Cathedral, he suffered an acid attack on his face and body by Russian citizen Elis Leonidovna Gonn, who was later arrested.

In statements after the attack, which occurred in the year in which the dictatorship’s repression against the Catholic Church worsened and required various surgeries and treatments, the priest forgave the aggressor, according to the newspaper. Confidential.

In August 2019, the Nicaraguan dictatorship, led by Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, released Leonidovna Gonn, who was later expelled from the country.

“May God our Lord have him enjoying his holy heaven, Father Mario Guevara. I thank the Almighty for his life and his ministry,” said researcher Martha Patricia Molina, author of the report, in her X account. Nicaragua: A persecuted Churchwhich in its latest edition reports more than a thousand attacks by the dictatorship and more than 16,500 processions and acts of piety prohibited by the Sandinista regime.

“Man of Prayer”

“It is interesting for one as a bishop and it is a joy, when one visits the parishes and how beautiful when many of the faithful remember their priests,” said Cardinal Brenes this Monday in his homily at the present body mass which he presided over in the Immaculate Conception of Mary parish, in the pastoral area of ​​Masaya.

“I have been in recent weeks, today in three parishes or four parishes of San Rafael del Sur and we remember how in more difficult situations Father Mario was there serving those communities with total generosity and in difficult situations but it is beautiful, without complaining, but with dedication,” the cardinal continued.

Speaking about the illness that the priest suffered, the cardinal commented that in “these last months, he could live like an ordeal, like a street of bitterness, his discomfort, but when I had the opportunity to visit him in the hospital and sometimes in the seminary, in the end, the smile. And above all, I was struck by seeing him near his bed, his liturgy of the hours and the holy rosary in his hands.”

“I think they were moments of strength, a man of prayer, he truly knew how to maintain that communication with God and also with our Mother, the Blessed Virgin,” he highlighted.

To conclude, the cardinal highlighted that Father Mario de Jesús “preached to us, not with great words, but with his life, his simple life, but which had complete strength. And what was the strength if not the person of Jesus himself?”