Nicaraguan regime attacks ‘depraved’ Vatican after Álvarez interview

Bishop Rolando Álvarez told EWTN there could be ‘no human explanation’ for his release from prison in Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan government branded the Vatican a “paedophile” state in response to an interview by an exiled bishop describing his release from prison in Nicaragua “a supernatural act of God”.

Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa, a diocese in central Nicaragua, spoke to EWTN on 7 February.  In a statement two days later, Nicaragua’s foreign ministry described the Vatican as “depraved” and “allies with forces of darkness, barbarism, genocide and evil”, as well as “very guilty of crimes against humanity”.

President Daniel Ortega’s regime dispatched Álvarez to Rome in January 2024, after he had served 500 days of a 26-year prison sentence on charges including treason and spreading fake news.

Álvarez told EWTN there could be “no human explanation” for his liberation, adding: “I always believed in my release … what sustained me was prayer.”

Travelling to the airport the day of his release, he had “recited and professed the Creed” with joy having suffered “for my faith in a holy, catholic, and apostolic [Church]”.

Reaching Rome, he planned to resign as Bishop of Matagalpa and apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Estelí, but Pope Francis asked him to remain in post.

“I am not exiled, I am liberated and in the diaspora,” where “faith always grows and hope is strengthened”, Álvarez said. He described his psychological, emotional, spiritual, moral and physical state on his arrival in Rome as “minus zero”. “Now, one year later, I can say that I am 90 per cent recovered,” he added.

Álvarez’s arrest in 2022 was one of the most high-profile detentions during a crackdown on dissent following protests in 2018 that saw more than 350 people killed.

In January this year, the Nicaraguan regime forced two communities of Poor Clares to abandon their convents, in what one observer dubbed “a night of terror”.

The Franciscan Poor Clare Sisters in Managua, and sisters of the Monastery of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Chinandega were allowed to take “only… a few belongings, just enough for their hands”, said Martha Patricia Molina, a lawyer who has documented nearly 1,000 attacks on the Church by Ortega’s regime. She said the nuns’ whereabouts were now unknown.

Bishop Álvarez also spoke to EWTN about the “extraordinary” participation of women in the Church in Central America. “I know women who are spiritual directors of bishops, chancellors, promoters of justice, coordinators of communities,” he said.

Álvarez, who attended the 2024 sessions of the Synod on Synodality, added: “I learned during the Synod that there are other ecclesial realities in which it seems that women do not have the same participation.”

Exiled Bishop Álvarez ‘close’ to fellow priests outside Nicaragua

US negotiates release of Nicaraguan political prisoners

Stay updated — add us as a preferred news source on Google: