By: Staff Writer
July 11, 2023
The Nicaraguan government has stepped up its assault against the Catholic Church, doubling down on its incarceration of Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos by now cancelling the legal personhood and confiscating the assets of the Sisters of the Fraternity of the Poor Ones of Jesus Christ.
The Daniel Ortega administration is in an all-out war against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua and is stopping at no ends to ensure key religious figures are made to yield to his will.
Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer and researcher, who authored the report “Nicaragua: a Persecuted Church?”, which details over 500 attacks against the Church by the regime, gave full account of the Sisters’s run in with the law on her Twitter account.
These attacks come just hours after Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos was released from incarceration, but then arrested again in a strange turn around by the Ortega government.
Bishop Alvarez was sent back to prison last week Wednesday after negotiations between the Nicaraguan bishops and the government of Daniel Ortega broke down, Nicaraguan news sources reported.
According to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Álvarez, bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa in Managua, was released on Monday but returned to custody Wednesday, July 5, after he refused to comply with the Ortega regime’s demand that he go into exile.
Following reports from Nicaraguan media and human rights activists that he was released from “Modelo Prison” on Monday night, Álvarez, an outspoken critic of the communist Ortega dictatorship, has been returned to captivity.
Since his Monday release, Álvarez has been sheltered at the headquarters of the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference (Conferencia Episcopal de Nicaragua, CEN) in the nation’s capital city Managua, according to Reuters.
The Catholic News Agency reported that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has demanded that the Nicaraguan government “immediately proceed to release” Alvarez, whom the regime in February sentenced to 26 years and four months in prison for being “a traitor to the homeland.”
In its June 27 ruling, the IACHR also demanded that, while “the necessary administrative procedures for the immediate release” of the bishop are carried out, that Álvarez be guaranteed “decent treatment” with access to health services, adequate food, and contact with relatives and lawyers.
“This order cannot be used to delay the release of the beneficiary,” the court decision specifies.
In its resolution, the IACHR also required the Nicaraguan government to report on the bishop’s situation by July 7 at the latest.
July 7 has passed and Alavrez still remains in Nicaraguan custody.
The Sisters, on the other hand, later tweeted that they have gone to El Salvador to continue their mission to serve the needy.
The rationale used for the decision to seize the convent was that the congregation “failed to comply with its obligations” by not reporting its latest financial statements and because the term of its board of directors had expired in February 2021.
The ministry said that it is now the responsibility of the attorney general’s office to transfer the assets of the congregation, including the convent, to the state.
“The measure adopted against the sisters is arbitrary, to which they now add the confiscation of their real estate,” Molina lamented.
In a statement to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Molina noted that “the Political Constitution of Nicaragua prohibits confiscation, but it has already become a common practice under the dictatorship, just like in the 1980s.”
The Sisters of the Fraternity of the Poor Ones of Jesus Christ arrived in Nicaragua in 2016 from Brazil, where they were founded by Father Gilson Sobreiro. They are also present in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
This new attack by the Ortega dictatorship against the women religious took place one year after the regime expelled a group of Missionaries of Charity, the congregation founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
The sisters were received by the Diocese of Tilarán-Liberia in neighboring Costa Rica.