Opinion | Nicaraguas regime cracks down on the Roman Catholic church

Dictatorship, and resistance to it, are recurrent themes of Central America’s history. Crucial to that story has been the role of the Roman Catholic Church, still the largest Christian denomination in the region, whose priests, nuns and bishops have offered support — material and moral — to democratic movements, often at the risk of punishment or death. The latest dictator to bully and threaten church leaders for political reasons is Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. On Aug. 19, Mr. Ortega’s police arrested the Rev. Rolando Álvarez, the bishop of the country’s seventh-largest city, and placed him under house arrest in Managua, the capital. Meanwhile, five priests and two seminarians were sent to the notorious jail for political prisoners, El Chipote. This attack on the country’s preeminent religious institution is a major escalation of repression that leaders from Washington to Rome must condemn and counteract.

Mr. Ortega’s crackdown began in 2018, to shut down a massive wave of protests that enjoyed support from students, middle-class professionals and many former members of his own Sandinista political party. Church leaders offered to mediate, many of them making clear their sympathy for the movement. Brushing aside dialogue, the regime unleashed its security forces and 355 people were killed, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Among the 180 political prisoners still languishing at El Chipote and other sites are politicians who had the temerity to consider opposing Mr. Ortega’s rigged reelection in 2021.

Bishop Álvarez stands accused of having “persisted in his destabilizing and provocative activities,” as a government statement put it. No doubt the bishop’s behavior did not suit the dictatorship. As far back as 2015, he led environmentalist protests against the government’s plans to allow gold mining in northern Nicaragua. At that time, the government heeded his protests and abandoned the mine project. What the Ortega regime cannot abide, apparently, are Bishop Álvarez’s more recent calls for electoral reform and the release of political prisoners, which he backed up by staging a protest fast in May. The arrest of Bishop Álvarez and other clergy are of a piece with the regime’s shutdown of seven church-owned radio stations on Aug. 1 and the ouster, in March, of the Vatican ambassador in Managua, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag. In April, Bishop Silvio Baez, the auxiliary archbishop of Managua, left the country, ostensibly because Pope Francis had recalled him to the Vatican. Bishop Baez was a target of frequent death threats and had been injured in an attack by pro-government demonstrators in 2018.

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Thus far, the Vatican has looked to avoid confrontation in its response to the Ortega regime’s assault. Consistent with that, the pope said Sunday that events in Nicaragua give him “worry and pain,” but he did not condemn or even mention the arrests specifically, calling instead for “open and sincere dialogue.” Bishop Baez, by contrast, tweeted: “With a pained, indignant heart I condemn the nighttime kidnapping of Monsignor Álvarez. Once again, the dictatorship has surpassed even its own evil and its diabolical spirit.” Speaking truth to power that way might not be enough to end repression in Nicaragua by itself. But there can’t be progress without it.

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