San José, Dec 30 (EFE).- Nicaraguan police detained five Roman Catholic priests from the Archdiocese of Managua between Friday and Saturday, bringing the total number of clergy detained in the last two weeks to 14, according to the Auxiliary Bishop of Managua, Silvio Báez, and exiled lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina.
The Nicaraguan priests detained between Friday night and Saturday are Silvio Fonseca, Mykel Monterrey, Raúl Zamora, Gerardo Rodríguez and Miguel Mántica, all from the Archdiocese of Managua, according to a report by Molina.
In addition, last week the government arrested Bishop Isidoro Mora, two priests and two seminarians. And this week they detained a total of nine more priests, seven of them from the Archdiocese of Managua.
Neither the government nor the national police have confirmed or denied the alleged detention of these 14 priests.
“The Sandinista dictatorship has this week unleashed a fierce hunt against priests, putting several of them in jail, in addition to two bishops who were already imprisoned,” said Báez, referring to Rolando Álvarez, who was arrested more than a year ago and sentenced in February to 26 years and 4 months in prison, stripped of his nationality and deprived of his citizenship for life for crimes of treason.
Báez lives in Miami because in 2019 Pope Francis asked him to leave Nicaragua amid tensions between the government of President Daniel Ortega and the Catholic Church.
He was later declared a “traitor to the homeland” and stripped of his nationality by the authorities.
Báez said through the social network X (formerly Twitter) that “the fury of Ortega’s criminal dictatorship unleashed against the Church continues.”
The exiled hierarch asked “the bishops and Episcopal Conferences of the world not to abandon us at this moment, to pray for the Church of Nicaragua and to show solidarity and raise their voices to denounce this persecution of the dictatorship against our Church.”
Will the imprisoned priests be sent to the Vatican?
According to researcher Molina, “the Sandinista dictatorship is preparing an exile or a massive criminal prosecution of priests,” as it did in October of last year, when the government released 12 other priests in its custody and sent them to the Vatican.
At the time Bishop Álvarez was not released because he refused to board a plane that was to take him to the United States along with 222 other Nicaraguan political prisoners, provoking the indignation of President Ortega, who described him in a national broadcast as “arrogant,” “unhinged,” and “a possesed maniac.”
Relations between the government of Daniel Ortega and the Catholic Church have been very tense, marked by the expulsion and imprisonment of priests, the prohibition of religious activities and the suspension of diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Nicaragua has been in a crisis since April 2018, which was accentuated after the elections of November 2021, in which Ortega was re-elected for a fifth term, the fourth in a row and the second with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice president, with his main rivals in prison. EFE
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