Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega has declared the Jesuit religious order illegal, mandating the confiscation of all its assets.
The Jesuit order, which supported the leftwing Sandinista guerilla group and rise to power of Daniel Ortega in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had grown more and more critical of the Ortega regime in recent years.
Jesuit Father Fernando Cardenal, a proponent of Liberation Theology and member of the Sandinistas, was Nicaragua’s minister of education from 1984 to 1990. Pope John Paul suspended Father Cardenal for his political activism in violation of Canon Law, along with a number of other priests, including his brother, Father Ernesto Cardenal.
Fernando Cardenal continued to live in a Jesuit house while he was education minister and was formally readmitted to the Jesuit order in 1997, after having renounced his membership in the Sandinistas in 1993.
As Daniel Ortega began adopting an ever-harsher stance against the Catholic Church, however, the Jesuit order became more and more critical of his policies, and the Jesuit-run Central American University (UCA) in Managua was a hub for 2018 protests against the Ortega regime.
On August 15, 2023, Ortega seized possession of the university through an order issued by Judge Gloria Saavedra, in which she alleged that the UCA had become a “center of terrorism,” “betrayed the trust of the Nicaraguan people,” and “transgressed the constitutional and legal order.”
The seizure of the university, one of 26 Nicaraguan universities closed by the Sandinista regime since 2021, was followed three days later by the eviction of the local Jesuit community from their nearby residence.
In response, the Central American province of the Jesuit order issued a formal rebuke to the government, denying the charges against the UCA as “totally false and unfounded.”
“This is a government policy that is systematically violating human rights and seems to be aimed at consolidating a totalitarian state,” they stated. “It is necessary and essential that our university be allowed to exercise its inalienable right to legitimate defense against said accusations.”
On August 23, Nicaraguan authorities moved to ban the entire Jesuit order from the country and ordered the confiscation of all its assets, alleging that the order had failed to comply with tax reporting.
The Central American Jesuit province issued another statement this week, condemning the “new aggression against the Jesuit Order in Nicaragua” and appealing for an immediate end to the regime’s “systematic repression.”
The Catholic Church in Nicaragua has been the target of many attacks and intimidations from the Ortega regime, and a number of clergy have been either expelled or arrested, such as Matagalpa Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who is serving 26 years in prison for trumped-up charges of treason, undermining national integrity, and spreading fake news.
Nicaraguan Catholic bishop Rolando Alvarez prays at the Santo Cristo de Esquipulas church in Managua, on May 20, 2022. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Thomas D. Williams is Breitbart Rome Bureau Chief and the author of The Coming Christian Persecution.