The Nicaraguan dictatorship eliminated a retirement fund for retired Catholic priests, which it had already frozen a year ago, increasing its siege against the Church in the Central American country.
According to the Nicaraguan newspaper The Pressthe Association for the Priestly Insurance Fund is one of the 1,500 NGOs whose legal personality was canceled by the dictatorship on August 19. The legal status of this association, the aforementioned newspaper indicates, had been approved by the National Assembly in 2005.
Receive the main news from ACI Prensa by WhatsApp and Telegram
It is increasingly difficult to see Catholic news on social media. Subscribe to our free channels today:
According to a source cited by La Prensa, with this measure, Catholic priests will no longer have the insurance benefits they paid annually.
“In my case I contributed US$300 (300 dollars) annually for many years and since last year I no longer paid due to the freezing of the accounts, but the theft has already become effective, which in the end was done to the parishioners, who generously They help us,” said the source.
What is the Priestly Insurance Fund in Nicaragua?
In July 2023, lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina, author of the report Nicaragua: A persecuted Church?which in its fifth installment this August reports 870 attacks by the dictatorship against the Catholic Church, denounced that the regime had frozen the money from the aforementioned fund.
“The national priestly insurance fund is an institution that was created more than 20 years ago by the CEN (Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua), thinking about a retirement fund for priests,” Molina explained then.
“It is not exactly insurance, because it does not cover health issues or other Social Security issues. It is intended as a retirement fund,” Molina said.
The fund receives $150 a year from active priests, parishes and ecclesiastical institutions, in addition to what is raised in the Ash Wednesday collections at the beginning of Lent.
From this fund, a monthly pension of $300 is allocated for priests aged 75 or older, and $150 for priests aged 65 or older.
Walter Sanchez 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.