The crisis is growing between Managua and the Holy See. Nicaragua is indeed considering suspending its relations with the Vatican, the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry said on Sunday after statements by Pope Francis against the regime in power in this American country.
“Faced with information disseminated by sources linked to the Catholic Church, the government of reconciliation and national unity of our blessed and always free Nicaragua specifies that a suspension of diplomatic relations is envisaged between the Vatican State and the Republic of Nicaragua,” the ministry said in a statement.
A “mafia” within the Vatican, according to Ortega
Pope Francis described the regime of President Daniel Ortega as a “crude dictatorship” on Friday, in an interview with the Argentine daily. Infobae. “With all due respect, I have no choice but to believe that this leader suffers from an imbalance,” he said. “It’s as if we wanted to establish the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitlerian dictatorship of 1935”, continued the pope.
Daniel Ortega for his part estimated at the end of February that a “mafia” within the Vatican decided on the election of the pope and senior religious leaders. “The people should elect the cardinals and there should be a vote among the Catholic people (…) so that the pope is also elected, by a direct vote of the people, so that it is the people who decide and not the mafia who decides. is organized there in the Vatican,” the Nicaraguan president said.
Imprisonment of Bishop Rolando Álvarez
This diatribe came more than a week after a statement by Pope Francis who said he was “concerned” and “saddened” by the situation in Nicaragua. On February 9, the government of Daniel Ortega released 222 political prisoners, expelled them to the United States and stripped them of their Nicaraguan nationality. Bishop Rolando Álvarez, detained since August 2022, refused to be extradited and was sentenced the next day to 26 years in prison, in particular for “conspiring and spreading false news”.