”Forced to leave Nicaragua in April 2019 for his defense of protesters against the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo — repression that left more than 350 dead, according to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights — Auxiliary Bishop of Managua, Monsignor Silvio Báez, warned from exile about the irrationality and cruelty that mark the dictatorship in the country.“One of the most tragic characteristics of this dictatorship is its irrationality. Alongside irrationality is cruelty. But the irrationality of this system is scandalous,” Bishop Báez stated in an interview with the Nicaraguan newspaper Confidencial, conducted in Madrid, Spain, where he participated in a congress in Ávila.
The bishop recalled the message he addressed to the regime on April 18, 2018, in response to the brutal repression: “I call on Daniel Ortega and his wife to stop the violence and repression. Do not endanger the peace of the country. Listen, engage in dialogue, and have the maturity to correct so many mistakes. For the good of Nicaragua, be sensible!”He said that message “has become even more relevant. I would repeat it to their faces, just as I told them eight years ago. Be sensible!”“Much blood has been shed, many lives sacrificed, much pain. And that has an infinite price.
I hope that all of this will not be in vain, and I trust that the Lord will gather all that blood, all that pain, all that struggle into His gracious hands, and that it will serve as fertilizer for a new stage in the history of Nicaragua,” the bishop said.Since 2018, the Nicaraguan government has intensified its persecution of the Catholic Church, controlling priests, expelling nuns, confiscating Church money and property, prohibiting ordinations, and exiling bishops, including Monsignor Báez himself. He now resides in Miami, Florida, United States.There he celebrates Mass every Sunday at St. Agatha Parish, where the parish priest and parochial vicar, Fathers Marcos Antonio Somarriba and Edwing Román, are also exiled Nicaraguans.
Báez said that “in Nicaragua there is a dictatorship that kills, persecutes, exiles, confiscates, lies, manipulates, and resembles the authoritarian, totalitarian regimes of the Bible. In Sacred Scripture, the reality of oppression, slavery, and injustice is more present than one might think.”The prelate emphasized that “the history of the biblical people begins with a state of oppression where there is a pharaoh who decides who lives and who dies, and who has the people subjected to slavery and uses them for his purposes of enrichment and greatness.”Faced with this reality, God “hears the cry of the oppressed, sees the suffering of the poor, and feels. He is a God who does not remain indifferent. He comes down into history. And God’s way of coming down in the book of Exodus was by calling Moses,” who freed the people of Israel and led them to the promised land.“Today, the pharaoh still exists, and what we believers must live by and hold as a deep conviction is that our God, the God of the Bible, the God the Father of Jesus Christ our God, is never on the side of a pharaoh.”
After denouncing that forcing people, a community, or the media to remain silent is a crime against human dignity, Bishop Báez spoke about silence in the Catholic Church.“In the Church there is a negative silence — a silence that exists to avoid problems, to avoid difficulties with powerful groups, with the established system, with whoever is in power. The easiest thing is to remain silent. And the Church falls into this temptation when it remains silent,” he denounced.“We are called as a community of Jesus to be a courageous, transparent community, a community of the Word. We are not a community of silence,” he said. He also noted there is a positive silence, which points to prayer and prudence, silencing “all human words in order to listen to the Lord.”“In my last days in Managua, I said something that many remember: ‘A crucified people will always rise again,’ because the Easter icon of the Cross shows us the same thing as in exile. For God, there is no final moment when everything ends. A new light can always shine in the darkness,” he affirmed.
Bishop Báez also remembered Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, Bishop of Matagalpa and Apostolic Administrator of Estelí, one of the four exiled Nicaraguan prelates. Álvarez was unjustly accused of treason and sentenced to 26 years and 4 months in prison, in a process full of irregularities, and was later exiled in January 2024.Báez said he suffered “greatly with the tragedy that Rolando experienced in Nicaragua, and I am left with the satisfaction that, apart from accompanying him in prayer every day,” he also “did everything within my power. I raised my voice in different states of the United States, in different media outlets” so that “he would not suffer in prison and so that he would be released.”Recalling Pope Francis’s decision for him to leave Nicaragua in 2019, the bishop admitted that accepting it “was very painful. I argued with Pope Francis at length, but he was convinced it was for the best.”“He told me, ‘I don’t want another martyred bishop in Central America.’ And he took me by the arm there in Rome and said, ‘Listen to me, I know what I’m saying.’ After a long discussion, I finally realized that there was no point in arguing with the Holy Father, and I noticed the affection and kindness with which he was trying to save me from an attack and a death that was very likely,” he recounted.
Regarding his ministry in exile, Bishop Báez said, “It is a challenge to pastoral creativity. One is where one’s heart is, not where one’s feet are. And I have discovered in these years of exile that not being physically present does not necessarily mean being far away.”An example of this is that on the last Monday of each month more than 200 exiled Nicaraguan priests meet via Zoom, a meeting that he says has the approval of Pope Leo XIV, and in which another bishop in exile, Monsignor Carlos Enrique Herrera, president of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, participates.“It is the clergy in exile, but that is one of the dimensions in which I carry out my episcopal ministry of being close to the priests,” he stated.