Preparations for popular, often daylong Lent and Holy Week processions are underway across Latin America — but not in Nicaragua.
They’ve been largely banned for a second 12 months, one among many concerns for the faithful in a rustic that human rights advocates, exiled priests and the U.S. government say is pursuing one among the world’s most flagrant persecutions of faith.
The Associated Press spoke with several priests who’re in exile in numerous countries, some after being imprisoned in inhumane conditions in Nicaragua. All requested their names, current locations and circumstances of departure from the Central American country be withheld for fear of repercussions against their families there.
More than 200 religious figures are in exile, making it difficult to carry Mass or hear confessions in Nicaragua, especially in small villages.
Many pastors still in Nicaragua are under near-constant surveillance, obliged to tell the police in the event that they need to visit someone who’s in poor health and to submit drafts of their sermons for approval, in accordance with those in exile and human rights activists.
With their bank accounts often frozen or stolen, some face shortages of food and medicine. One Catholic priest said his fellow clergy are attempting to serve their flock while feeling constrained by constant threat.
U.S. denounces Nicaragua’s crackdown on religion
The U.S. government has condemned the Nicaraguan government — led by co-presidents Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo — for the crackdown that seems to have intensified lately.
On his February trip to the region, Secretary of State Marco Rubio singled out the Nicaraguan government’s effort “to eliminate the Catholic Church and the religious community, and anyone who tries to take power from that regime is punished.”
In its annual report published in March, the U.S. government’s Commission on International Religious Freedom denounced conditions in Nicaragua as “abysmal.” More than 80% of the population is Christian, about evenly divided between Catholics and evangelicals.
“Religious freedom is form of the canary within the coal mine for the jeopardy of all human rights,” said the commission’s chair, Stephen Schneck.
The commission found that over the past 12 months, the Nicaraguan government harassed and deported Catholic clergy, used “intimidation and manipulation” to force leaders of the Indigenous Moravian Church into exile, arrested members of the evangelical Mountain Gateway ministry and allowed attacks on sanctuaries, including arson that destroyed a 400-year-old crucifix within the capital, Managua.
The commission denounced the “arbitrary” cancellation of legal status of most faith-based organizations, which regularly results in property seizures. All nuns were ordered to depart the country.
“These are the nuns that actually take care of the poorest of the poor,” said Maureen Ferguson, one among the U.S. commissioners. “What happens to them when these religious institutions, people motivated by faith, are exiled?”
Government tries to ‘co-opt’ faith, critics say
To prevent last 12 months’s Easter-time processions, 1000’s of police were deployed, in accordance with the report. Only clergy “aligned” with the federal government are allowed outdoor worship.
Local governments often create parallel festivities to provide the impression that popular piety continues to be free, advocacy groups like British-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide say.
That’s a part of the technique to attempt to co-opt the clergy and the faithful, said Félix Maradiaga, a Nicaraguan opposition leader and practicing Catholic who was jailed, then exiled to the United States in 2023.
The Sandinista government “has an extended history of attempting to create a parallel church, of wanting to take possession of the symbols of religion,” said Maradiaga, who wasn’t allowed to hope publicly or to have a Bible while imprisoned. “The model that Sandinistas need to implement could be very just like that of China. … They won’t stop their pressure on the Catholic Church until they obtain a bishops’ conference not directly aligned with the dictatorship’s ideology. They won’t succeed.”
Tensions between Nicaragua and faith leaders
Like several Latin American governments tracing their roots back to socialist revolutions, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front has had an uneven relationship with faith leaders for a long time.
The Catholic Church drew the present government’s ire when priests and nuns provided shelter and first aid to those injured when the Ortega government violently repressed civic protests in 2018.
The government has blamed “terrorist” clergy for supporting unrest. Clergy and lay observers say the church has been an increasingly rare voice opposing state violence.
A school professor when the protests began, Maradiaga said students called him saying “They’re killing us” — and clergy opened their churches’ doors.
“What the church did was put itself on the side of those that were being persecuted,” Maradiaga recalled.
Several priests in exile said they witnessed youth being shot in the course of the protests and tended to them, seeing it as an important a part of their ministry to assist those hurting.
New types of repression, but lingering hope
Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer who fled to the United States, has recorded nearly 1,000 instances of church persecution in Nicaragua from 2018 through 2024. Among those prior to now 12 months are arrests and deportations of clergy and the prohibition of a public Via Crucis procession — the Lent devotion commemorating Jesus’ path to the cross.
“The repression prior to now few months has a latest face. The people who find themselves under attack now now not speak out and denounce the abuses, because in the event that they do this, the repression only grows,” she said.
Out of eight bishops and one cardinal in Nicaragua’s Catholic conference, 4 are in exile — together with greater than 150 clergy and seminarians in addition to nearly 100 nuns and non secular sisters who were exiled, fled for his or her safety or haven’t been allowed back to Nicaragua, per Molina’s count.
According to the Vatican, Nicaragua has exiled five groups of priests since 2022, most to the United States and Rome — including Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who was jailed for greater than a 12 months before being released and sent overseas in early 2024 after negotiations with the Holy See.
For the December solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, to whom Nicaraguans are particularly devout, Pope Francis wrote a letter exhorting them to not doubt God’s “care and mercy.”
The faithful proceed to attend Mass — although some have also taken to gathering in secret to avoid suspected government spies who record those within the pews, Molina and a few clergy said.
The fear is palpable, and private. Molina’s father died recently within the United States, so she asked just a few priests in Nicaragua in the event that they could be willing to say a Mass over his ashes.
None was, fearing repercussions for his or her congregations. She hopes she might sooner or later have the opportunity to return to grant her father burial of their homeland.
Several of the clergy in exile said the flexibility to imagine in a distinct future for his or her country is one thing they haven’t been forced to depart behind.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely chargeable for this content.
