LEÓN, Nicaragua (LifeSiteNews) — Nicaragua’s communist government has banned clergy of the Diocese of León from conducting pastoral visits to laypeople’s homes, in the latest of a series of crackdowns on the Catholic Church in the country.
The clergy have been ordered not to leave their parishes to carry out any pastoral activity, including preaching, according to Nicaraguan lawyer Martha Patricia Molina, author of the report Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church.
Police officers representing the authoritarian government of Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo gave the command to clergy, sources “close to the Church” confirmed, according to InfoCatólica. The verbal orders came ahead of a parish mission planned for January 24 in the Diocese of León, which was to involve traditional door-to-door visits.
InfoCatólica noted that home visits as part of parish missions are a regular part of Catholic life in Latin America and that banning priests from leaving their churches “effectively reduces religion to the private sphere, stripping it of its social and communal dimensions.”
The ban intensifies the Ortega regime’s ongoing persecution of the Catholic Church over the past decades. The government has unjustly arrested priests, expelled religious congregations, shut down Catholic radio stations, and, according to Molina, has banned the ordination of deacons and ordered the shutdown of evangelization-focused social media pages.
“On many occasions, policemen have entered retreats to interrupt them and speak about matters entirely unrelated to religion, using the priests’ own sound systems while the retreats were underway. I could go on and on listing these arbitrary abuses,” Molina told CruxNow.
The participation of some priests in protests against the Ortega regime in 2018 is said to have prompted the dictator to make the Catholic Church his regime’s number one enemy. Since then, the regime has become increasingly paranoid about any potential opposition.
“They feel threatened by many ghosts. One of them is linked to people gathering. The idea of people visiting one another and sharing a message terrifies Ortega and Murillo,” Nicaraguan political analyst Enrique Sáenz told Crux.
“The totalitarian nature of the regime – this paranoid element and its obsession with clinging to power are part of it – leads to the absurd attempt to control the minds of the population,” he said.
“This policy of public banishment aims, on the one hand, to restrict the Church’s influence in society as much as possible, and on the other hand, to gradually stifle all Catholic life and to completely eradicate Catholicism from the country,” noted FSSPX News.
