One of the 3 deacons, who was going to be ordained a priest of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua this Saturday, July 27, reported the cancellation of the ordination Mass, which would be due to an order from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega.
Deacon Wendel Fuentes Chavarria shared a note on Friday the 26th in which he reported the cancellation of the event, a text published by the Nicaraguan newspaper Mosaic. Along with him, Kelin José Martínez Rayo and Ervin Joel Hernández Umanzor were also going to be ordained priests.
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The three belong to the diocese of Estelí, which has not had a bishop since 2021 and where the Bishop of Matagalpa, Mons. Rolando Álvarez, was appointed Apostolic Administrator, who was kidnapped by the dictatorship, prevented from leaving his house, sentenced to 26 years in prison, imprisoned and finally deported to Rome in January of this year, where he now lives in exile.
“With a heart full of hope, joy and spiritual health, I want to inform you that the priestly ordination of this unworthy servant of the Lord has been canceled for reasons that are not yet clear, but that are external to our ecclesial life,” he explains in his notes Deacon Wendel Fuertes.
“I encourage you to continue praying for priestly vocations, we hope that soon God will allow us to serve this diocese more and better as priests,” the text adds.
An article from Mosaic of July 25 indicates that “an ecclesiastical source” informed them of the cancellation of the ordination after the order of the local police.
“Only the Police arrived at Father Frutos (Valle Salmerón) – ‘Ad Omnia’ administrator of the Diocese of Estelí – to tell him that the ordination was not authorized,” the source indicated.
In January 2023 and in the forced absence of Bishop Álvarez, who at that time was under house arrest, Father Frutos Constantino Valle Salmerón (79) was appointed administrator to everything of the diocese of Estelí, to ensure the administrative management and assets of the local Church.
The priestly ordination Mass this Saturday was going to be presided over by Mons. Carlos Herrera, Bishop of Jinotega and president of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, who last week had celebrated the first priestly and diaconal ordination in the diocese of Matagalpa, after the exile by Mons. Álvarez.
ACI Prensa contacted the diocese of Jinotega to inquire about the reasons for the cancellation of the ordination in Estelí. Until the publication of this news, no response has been received.
Since 2018, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, has intensified persecution against the Catholic Church.
The Nicaraguan researcher and lawyer Martha Patricia Molina presented the fourth installment of her report in October 2023 Nicaragua: A persecuted Church?which accounts for 667 attacks and aggressions against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.
Molina has announced that the fifth delivery of the report will be carried out next August 15.
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.