Nicaragua shuts down Jesuits and our first Jesuit pope has nothing to say?
The slimebag in designer sunglasses President Reagan called 'the little dictator' is hitting peak Marxist thug these days, not just turning Nicaragua into a socialist hellhole, but driving hundreds of thousands of his nationals from their homeland, seeking refuge in el norte.
Now he's shut down the entire Jesuit order in Nicaragua, expropriating their properties and reportedly ordering all Jesuit priests out of the country:
MEXICO CITY — Nicaragua’s government on Wednesday declared the Jesuit religious order illegal and ordered the confiscation of all its property.
The move comes one week after the government of President Daniel Ortega confiscated the Jesuit-run University of Central America in Nicaragua, arguing it was a “center of terrorism.”
The confiscation order published Wednesday claimed the Roman Catholic order had failed to comply with tax reporting.
Where is Pope Francis, the world's first Jesuit pope?
Turns out he's silent, and that's weird stuff, given that Jesuits have been Ortega's closest comrades in arms in his climb to total power.
According to PillarCatholic:
The seizure of the university and the revocation of the Jesuits’ legal identity, represent a long shift for the Society of Jesus in Nicaragua — now treated as enemies of the state, Jesuits were vocal supporters of Daniel Ortega when he took power in 1979, amid the country’s "Sandinista Revolution."
...and...
After a bloody civil war in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, a left-wing guerrilla group, seized power in the country in 1979.
Among its leaders were priests like Fr. Fernando Cardenal, SJ, and his brother Ernesto, along with Fr. Miguel D'Escoto and Fr. Edgar Parrales—all of whom unceremoniously supported the revolutionary violence.
All those priests would hold positions in the Sandinista government, and all except Fr. Fernando Cardenal would be suspended by John Paul II in 1984 for not resigning their posts.
These were Ortega's commissar buddies during the bad old days of Sandinista abuses of power during the Reagan era.
Now they're regime's kulaks.
How things change.
What's strangest here is that Pope Francis has said nothing. That's his order being gutted here, and he's got a golden opportunity to play the role of John Paul II and speak out against Marxist barbarism, given his influence in those parts.
His response? Nothing. He did say the Ortega regime was comparable to communists a few weeks ago, which was kind of a weak understatement given that they're real communists.
Now there is a backstory to this barbarism, no matter what you might think of the largely left-wing Jesuits.
The trouble started when mass protests emerged from Catholic universities against Ortega's thuggy regime in 2018. Things have gone downhill since then.
According to Teo Babun, writing for the Washington Examiner:
This year has seen an all-out war against Catholic leaders. In March, the Ortega regime expelled Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, the apostolic nuncio since 2018, giving him a week to leave. In May, police and paramilitary groups prevented Rev. Harving Padilla and parishioners in Masaya from leaving or entering a church for three days. Later in May, Rev. Manuel Garcia was detained after he wielded a machete as he tried to fend off pro-regime thugs taunting and insulting him outside his parish. He was later sentenced by a court to two years in prison, making him the first priest imprisoned since the 2018 protests.
In its zealous persecution of the Catholic Church, the Ortega regime has also gone after the church’s educational and charitable institutions. This year alone, the regime has forcibly closed more than 1,000 civil society organizations, many of which are Catholic. In June, the regime canceled the legal status of the Missionaries of Charity, an order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and expelled the nuns, escorting them to the Costa Rican border.
One priest who has particularly drawn the Ortega regime’s ire is Monsignor Rolando Alvarez, bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa, who is one of the most vocal critics of the regime’s human rights abuses. Earlier this summer, he went on a hunger strike to protest his treatment and the closure of seven Catholic radio stations that he directed. Then, a few weeks ago, he and 10 others, including seminarians and lay persons, were placed under house arrest in the episcopal offices. The police announced an investigation of Alvarez and other Catholic leaders for using communications platforms and social media to organize and incite acts of hatred and disturbing the peace.
The Jesuits are a seemingly odd target all right, not just because they have their historic and comradely alliance with Ortega from the wayback. It's that they remain leftwing, yet they haven't been particularly noisy or active about it. Yes, the confiscated university was a Jesuit one, but there hasn't been much going on there in the last five years. Crackdowns against the Church have happened in other parts of the Church.
Yet it was the Jesuits who were targeted.
I get the feeling they were targeted because Ortega wantede to send a message to Pope Francis.
The pope has coddled Marxist dictators for years and Ortega wanted to show him that he was a badass. He wanted some gangsterly "respect," for his sheer horribleness.
Rather than criticize him, the pope has called for "dialogue" in the case of the corrupt communist regime of Venezuela, and largely responded the same way to every communist hellhole that's persecuting its Christian population.
His response to recent provocations, according to Babun, is here:
Troublingly, one important voice has remained largely muted — that of Pope Francis. The silence from the Vatican for weeks since the crackdown on Nicaraguan Catholic leaders provoked cries of frustration: A group of Nicaraguans in exile penned a letter to Pope Francis urging him to speak out against the Ortega regime. This silence was especially painful given the Vatican’s, and particularly the pope’s, tremendous moral authority in Latin America.
Finally, on Aug. 21, Pope Francis expressed “concern” about the situation and said he desired to see a “sincere and open dialogue” between the government and the opposition. This statement demonstrates either an inexcusable ignorance about the true nature of the Ortega regime, which is incapable of engaging in the kind of dialogue that is needed to bring positive change, or a disappointing timidity.
Sincere and open dialogue? Seems the barn door was left open on that one years ago. The horse is long gone.
That's only emboldened Ortega to act out even more. If so, it would be entirely in character.
Recall that the last time Ortega met a coddler from the West, in the person of one Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in 2009.
Back then, Obama badly wanted to make friends with Ortega and all the other Marxist dictators, despite State Department advice against it.
Here's a news account from the era, from Slate:
The Venezuelan leader was unusually gracious toward President Obama, cozying up for a photo op and even giving him some beach reading: The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. The gift was pointed, no doubt, but the gesture was a stark contrast with Chávez’s usual rants about U.S. imperialism and Bolivarian revolution.
That, he left to Ortega. The Nicaraguan president took 50 minutes—he was allotted 10—to denounce U.S. aggression in the region, focusing in particular on U.S. support of 1950s Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and its “illegal” sponsorship of the Contras in the 1980s. He also criticized the embargo on Cuba and asked why the island was not represented at the summit. Obama, he declared, is “the head of an empire imprisoned by rules he can’t change.”
Now Ortega is acting up a second time, this time against the Jesuits and more particularly, the pope.
Yet he doesn't seem to understand that Ortega is directly targeting him.
All it tells us is that the great Ronald Reagan was right about this dirtball, and read him correctly from the start. The pope's weakness and calls for dialogue are only emboldening Ortega to act ever more thuggishly to the Catholic Church. It's time the pope get on the ball as to what's happening here, before Ortega can shut the entire Church down in Nicaragua.
Image: Cancillería Ecuador via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY SA 2.0