ROME — Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega has broken off diplomatic relations with the Holy See after Pope Francis described Ortega’s regime as a “Hitlerian” dictatorship.
The Vatican confirmed Sunday that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has verbally communicated a “suspension” in diplomatic relations, expressly alluding to the pontiff’s recent declarations.
Ortega had already expelled the Vatican’s nuncio to Nicaragua, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, and since March 2022 Senegalese Monsignor Marcel Mbaye Diouf has been in charge of the Vatican diplomatic mission in Nicaragua as chargé d’affaires. He has reportedly been given a week to leave the country.
The expulsion of the nuncio in 2022 marked the beginning of a period of intensified hostility, persecution, and harassment against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. The government has closed Catholic radio stations, shuttered two universities, desecrated churches, expelled the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, banned Holy Week processions, imprisoned a bishop, and exiled eight priests, stripping them of citizenship.
On Friday, the Miami-based online news outlet infobae released a lengthy interview with the pope in which he commented for the first time on the situation in Nicaragua and the regime’s aggression against the Catholic Church.
“With great respect, I cannot help but think of an imbalance in the person who leads,” he said of Daniel Ortega. “There we have a bishop in prison, a very serious man, very capable. He wanted to offer his witness and did not accept exile.”
“It is completely out of place, as if bringing back the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitlerian dictatorship of 1935, bringing the same here,” he stated. “They are a boorish type of dictatorships. Or, to use local jargon from Argentina, ‘guarangas’ [tacky].
Ortega has often railed against the Catholic Church, and last year described Church leadership as a “mafia” and a “perfect dictatorship” that does not represent the principles of God or Jesus Christ.
“Since when do they have the authority to speak of democracy?” Ortega said last September. “Who elects the priests, the bishops, the pope, the cardinals? How many votes? Who gives them to them?”
If the Catholic Church wants to talk about democracy, it should start “by electing the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the priests with the vote of the Catholics, otherwise everything is imposed, it is a dictatorship, a perfect dictatorship, a tyranny, a perfect tyranny,” he declared.
Nicaragua’s most recent diplomatic representative to the Holy See is Yara Suhyén Pérez Calero, who served until this weekend as counselor minister in the Vatican.
The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo are thus putting an end to a diplomatic relationship of at least 115 years, since relations between Nicaragua and the Holy See began in 1908.
In this way, Nicaragua enters a small band of thirteen countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See, four of whom have communist governments — Vietnam, North Korea, China, and Laos — and eight with Islamic governments — Somalia, Oman, Mauritania, Maldives, Comoro Islands, Brunei, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. The other is Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom in South Asia.
Pope Francis, 86, is celebrating his ten-year anniversary as leader of the world’s Catholics, having been elected pope on March 13, 2013.
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