Nicaragua: Dictatorship banishes foreign priests and nuns

Lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina denounced that the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, in Nicaragua has banished from Nicaragua a group of foreign priests and nuns who worked in the Central American country.

“There were two meetings. It seems that they were summoned from different congregations or from different parts of the country. All the priests and religious who attended were foreigners. During the time they were in that ‘lockdown’ they were shown an indoctrinating video of the dictatorial couple,” Molina explained in an interview with EWTN News.

Martha Patricia Molina is the author of the report Nicaragua: A persecuted Church?which in its fifth installment on August 15 reports 870 attacks by the Nicaraguan dictatorship against the Catholic Church.

Molina also explained that the religious were threatened with imprisonment or exile if they said or did anything that the dictatorship could consider hostile.

“I had information that some of the religious were banished from the country and were also prohibited from speaking because there are some religious, from those same congregations, who remain in the country and do not have this authorization: they are under constant threat from the dictatorship,” he denounced. .

Molina also referred to the recent closure of 1,500 non-profit organizations or NGOs, including hundreds of Catholic and evangelical organizations, such as the retirement fund for priests that had existed for 24 years and that last year had already been frozen by the dictatorship.

“This is a serious impact on the sick and retired priests and it is also a robbery from us lay people and the Catholic Church, who had constantly contributed to this fund to later sustain their health and also give them help – which is well appreciated.” they deserve – retired priests,” explained the researcher in exile to EWTN Noticias.

“As Sandinismo does: it steals everything, disappears everything and uses it for the party’s own benefit, and also to continue using it in repression. It is something that the Church is not going to recover,” he said.

In addition to the taxes on goods and alms approved by the government on August 22, and with the cancellation of the priestly fund, “what the dictatorship is doing is increasingly suffocating the Catholic Church, since, with All the attacks that have been committed have not been able to completely eliminate the Catholic faith and religion of Nicaragua, which is what they intend,” Molina said.

Catholic schools affected

In this wave of closure of non-profit organizations, “countless religious schools that belong to different orders were also affected (…) These schools, since 2020, have had their savings accounts confiscated, blocked by the dictatorship,” he denounced. Molina.

As happened with the Jesuit Central American University (UCA), which was confiscated in 2023 and has not functioned again to this day, the Nicaraguan dictatorship does not know “what it is going to do with all these schools, which are close to confiscate, because they will not be able to manage them.”

“At the moment,” Molina says, “they have the religious men and women in charge of the schools, but they have threatened them, telling them that all the money they get from paying tuition is going to go to the coffers of the Sandinista front and also that they will have permanent surveillance regarding education.”

“To date they have not taken away their schools, but it is in the law that all those assets are going to pass to the state,” he warned.

The decision to cancel the 1,500 organizations was announced through ministerial agreement 38-2024-OSFL, published on August 19 in the official gazette. The Gazetteand signed by the Minister of the Ministry of the Interior of Nicaragua, María Amelia Coronel Kinloch.

The text indicates that the Attorney General’s Office must carry out the transfer of the movable and immovable property of all these organizations “in the name of the State of Nicaragua.”