The United States government declared itself concerned this Friday about the “forced exile” of Nicaraguan bishop Carlos Herrera.
“Concerned about the forced exile of Bishop Herrera, President of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, by the Nicaraguan authorities. Half of Nicaragua’s bishops cannot return home. Ortega and Murillo’s flagrant attacks against the Catholic clergy will not weaken the faith of their people.”Brian Nichols, US Undersecretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, wrote on his X social network account this Friday.
Monsignor Carlos Herrera, of the diocese of Jinotega (northern Nicaragua), was forced by agents of the Sandinista regime to get on a commercial flight to Guatemala on Wednesday night. He is the third bishop expelled from the country after Rolando Álvarez, from Matagalpa (north), and Isidoro Mora, from Siuna (northeast), who were imprisoned and welcomed in Rome.
The NGO Collective Nicaragua Never Again, made up mostly of exiled Nicaraguan activists and based in San José, also repudiated Herrera’s exile, “an act of repression that not only affects a religious leader, but also symbolizes the growing and unstoppable persecution and repression that the Catholic Church faces in our country.”
The organization maintained that the exile or forced transfer, due to the systematic nature with which it has been committed in Nicaragua, should be considered a crime against humanity, and it is “an act that must be denounced and condemned by the international community.”
The 75-year-old bishop was expelled from Nicaragua and sent to Guatemala after denouncing at a mass a sacrilege by the Sandinista mayor of the municipality of Jinotega, Leónidas Centeno, according to the exiled Nicaraguan priest Erick Díaz and the exiled researcher Martha Patricia Molina, author of the study. ‘Nicaragua: A persecuted Church?’.
According to the complainants, Authorities of the Daniel Ortega regime forced Bishop Herrerra to go to the Managua international airport, and from there “they banished him to Guatemala on November 13”where he was received at the Provincial House of the Franciscan Friars, the religious order to which he belongs.
“The expulsion of Bishop Herrera occurred days after he described as sacrilegious that the dictatorship, through Mayor Leónidas Centeno, placed loudspeakers with loud music in front of the San Juan Bautista Cathedral during the Eucharist on November 10,” noted the Collective. “Usually the repressors of the dictatorship play loud music near churches to boycott masses. Then the dictatorship closed the Facebook page of the Diocese of Jinotega,” he stated.
That NGO pointed out that since 2018 they have witnessed “a systematic injustice by the Nicaraguan dictatorship represented by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, which has led to the banishment and exile of more than 200 religious people, among them, 35 priests who have been denationalized, and the cancellation of more than 1,262 religious organizations.”
“This direction towards intolerance has also manifested itself with 65 religious people judicially accused of unfounded charges, all with the aim of silencing voices that advocate for peace, justice, democracy and the defense of human rights in Nicaragua,” he noted.
Furthermore, he recalled that between 2018 and 2024 “more than 870 attacks have been perpetrated against the Catholic Church among them fires like the one that pro-government groups did against the image of the Blood of Christ, in the Managua Cathedral in July 2020.
The relations between the Ortega regime and the Catholic Church are experiencing moments of great tension, characterized by the expulsion, imprisonment and denationalization of bishops and priests, the prohibition of religious activities and the suspension of diplomatic relations.
(With information from EFE)
