The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua blocked the retirement funds of retired priests as the new attack against the Catholic Church according to a complaint by lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina.
“Older priests are not receiving their pensions from the national priestly insurance fund, the product of years of contributing, due to the blocking of bank accounts for the Catholic Church,” Molina wrote on the social network X (formerly known as Twitter), who is the author of the report “Nicaragua, a Persecuted Church ? ”, which accounts for more than 500 attacks against the Church in the country since 2018.
“The national priestly insurance fund is an institution that was created more than 20 years ago by the CEN (Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua), thinking of a retirement fund for priests. It is not exactly insurance, because it does not cover health issues or other Social Security issues. It is intended as a retirement fund,” Molina specified, according to the Nicaraguan newspaper Confidencial Digital.
The fund receives $150 a year from active priests, parishes, and church institutions, in addition to what is collected from the Ash Wednesday collections.
Molina explained that several retired priests reported that they had been notified that the money was blocked. The CEN has not ruled on this new attack by the Ortega dictatorship.
From this fund, a pension of $300 is allocated for priests 75 years of age or older, and $150 for priests who are 65 years of age or older.
“This fund has worked for more than 20 years without any complications. Among the latest disastrous measures of the dictatorship against the accounts of the Catholic Church, they have disabled this fund, in such a way that older priests are not being able to collect their pensions. This is one of the most dramatic conditions of the current situation”, added Molina.
In May of this year, the regime had ordered the freezing of the bank accounts of parishes and dioceses in Nicaragua; to later order something similar, but with the priests in June.
The dictatorship recently ordered the confiscation of the assets of the 222 former political prisoners deported to the United States, who had already been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality.