The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife and “co-president” Rosario Murillo have made around 1000 attacks against the Catholic Church in last six years says in a report published by the researcher and lawyer Martha Patricia Molina.
“This sixth issue documents 971 attacks against religious institutions. This is evidence that the attack on religious freedom continues in Nicaragua,” says the 443-page report titled “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church”, released on 20 December.
The new report lists the various types of attacks – such as sieges, bans, repression of religious figures, thefts and desecrations; and confiscations – perpetrated by the dictatorship between April 2018 and December 2024.
According to Molina’s report, the year with the highest number of attacks was 2023, with 321. The year in which the lowest number of attacks was recorded was 2018, with 93. 2024 closes with 177 attacks by the dictatorship against the Catholic Church.
According to Molina’s report, the dictatorship has carried out 11,763 prohibitions on popular Catholic piety activities.
Regarding attacks against the Church, Molina told EWTN News on December 23 that “this year 2024 we have seen a slight decrease compared to the previous year, 177 this year and more than 320 in 2023, but this does not mean that the attacks against the Church by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship have decreased, but rather that religious and lay people have decided not to report them.”
This, he continues, is because “when they make complaints, if they do, they receive greater repression, and this is the reason for the decrease” in this last year.
The researcher explained that the most common attacks recently have been “the closure of non-profit organizations , which are the social projects that the Catholic Church carried out in the interior of the country; also the closure of media outlets such as Radio María Nicaragua , as well as the permanent harassment and surveillance of religious people.”
Regarding the reasons for the tenacious persecution, Martha Patricia Molina considered that “the objective of the dictatorship continues to be the same, which is to eradicate the Catholic faith of the Nicaraguan people, and also to make the Church fall under its own weight, but it is definitely an institution that has existed for thousands of years and a dictatorship will not eradicate it so easily, although it is true that with the hard blows they are dealing, they are weakening pastoral work.”
“The dictatorship’s aim is to make the Catholic faith disappear from the country, but obviously they will not be able to achieve this because it is something that is extremely ingrained in us Nicaraguans,” he concluded.