Nicaraguan clergy hit by new wave or arrests

The Nicaraguan authorities arrested twelve priests and a deacon over the past fortnight.

Reports said most of the arrests were in the Diocese of Matagalpa, formerly headed by Bishop Rolando Álvarez until his arrest in August 2022 and exile to Rome in January this year.

The administrator of the neighbouring Diocese of Estelí, the 80-year-old Fr Frutos Valle, was ordered not to carry out the planned ordination of three deacons. When reports appeared of the restriction, Fr Valle was taken to Managua, where he was placed in detention in the Fátima seminary.

Ten further arrests of clergy took place on 2 August. The analyst Martha Patricia Molina – who was forced to flee Nicaragua for reporting on repression of the Church – said that in some cases the arrests were violent, with residences sacked and computers and devices seized.

Among the priests arrested was Mgr Ulises René Vega Matamoros, the chancellor of the Diocese of Matagalpa. Another was Fr Silvio Josué Romero Juárez OFM, a former rector of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Managua and lectured at the Jesuit Central American University until it was closed by the government in 2018.

The day before, anti-riot police arrested Fr Marlon Velásquez Flores, a former chancellor of the John Paul II Catholic University. Witnesses reported he was taken away in a white van without number-plates.

On 5 August, parishioner reported that the authorities had arrested the rector of the diocesan seminary in Matagalpa, Fr Jarvin Tórrez.

La Prensa, a daily published in Costa Rica, estimated that 23 per cent of Nicaragua’s clergy have been forced to leave the country since protests against President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime in 2018. It said those that have left tended to be the best educated and most experienced.

Humberto Belli, a former education minister and opponent of the Sandinistas who now lives the United States, has said that the regime’s persecution of the Church was religious rather than political. 

He said the transfer of 17 detained clergy including Álvarez to the Vatican was agreed on condition that the Nicaraguan hierarchy would not protest against the government’s treatment of the Church. However, he suggested that Catholic members of the Sandinista movement were uneasy at the government’s conduct.

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