Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega delivers a speech in Havana December 14, 2022. Photo: OSV News/Yamil Lage, pool via Reuters Walter Sánchez Silva (CNA)
The Nicaraguan dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his “co-president” and wife, Rosario Murillo, this week kidnapped and expelled from the country Fr Floriano Ceferino Vargas, a priest of the Diocese of Bluefields.
Medardo Mairena, a former peasant leader now in exile, stated on X that “Fr Floriano Ceferino Vargas, parish priest of the Church of San Martín de Porres in Nueva Guinea, has been exiled by the Sandinista regime”, further specifying that the priest is now in Panama.
In an interview with EWTN Noticias, lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina said it is not known exactly why Vargas was kidnapped and expelled from the country.
However, Ms Molina said, “just because you are religious in Nicaragua, the dictatorship can kidnap you”.
Ms Molina, who has documented hundreds of attacks by the Nicaraguan government against the Catholic Church in recent years, also indicated that it is possible that the priest had made “some comment that they [the dictatorship] consider hostile to the supposed revolution, which at every moment they say must be defended”.
The researcher also commented that, in the midst of everything, it is good to know that the priest “is not going to be in the prisons of Nicaragua, where more than 40 mechanisms of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment are practiced”.
The priest was arrested after celebrating Mass in his parish.
The kidnapping and expulsion of Vargas happened the same week Pope Francis sent a letter to the country’s Catholics in which he encouraged them and reminded them that faith and hope “work miracles”.
Growing concern for the well-being of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua was also expressed this week by the bishops of Central America, who convoked for December 8, the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a day of prayer for the persecuted Church in the neighbouring country.
Since October 2023, more than 200 religious persons have been banished, expelled from or denied entry into the country. In total, since 2018, 46 priests and bishops have been released from prison and expelled to the Vatican State or the United States. Currently, other lay people linked to the Catholic Church remain in prison, including collaborators of Caritas Esteli.