Posted on 08/05/2022 7:42:01 PM PDT by ebb tide
China and Russia are today invading almost all of the comments on the Holy See’s international policy, in both cases anything but brilliant.
But there are other countries in the world where the Catholic Church lives in no less dramatic situations of authentic persecution. And yet the pope is keeping quiet, as in the case of Nicaragua. Or, at the other extreme, he overdoes it in obsequious loquacity, as in the case of Cuba.
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His admiration for the Cuban regime has never been something Jorge Mario Bergoglio has kept secret. In the photo above he is seen in a deferential pose with Fidel Castro, in the forty minutes of the conversation he had with him during his trip to Havana in 2015.
But also with his brother Raúl, for decades a true strongman of the Castrist persecutory system, Pope Francis says he is cultivating “a human relationship.” He took care to make this known in an interview with the Mexican TV network Televisa last July 11, exactly one year after the ruthless repression across the island of the biggest popular protest against the dictatorship in the last thirty years.
In the interview, Francis’s praise of the Castro regime – “Cuba is a symbol. Cuba is a great story ”- naturally made the headlines of “Granma,” the official newspaper of the Cuban communist party. But it raised a unanimous chorus of protests from representatives of the opposition, to a large extent Catholics, in exile and in their home country, all deeply wounded by the pope’s words.
In 2015 Pope Francis told journalists he had spoken amiably with Fidel Castro about his Jesuit prep school education and his friendship with some of the Jesuits. Thereby giving credence to the critical thesis of Professor Loris Zanatta of the University of Bologna, a specialist on Latin America, presented in his 2020 book entitled “Jesuit populism. Perón, Fidel, Bergoglio” and revisited a few days ago in his vitriolic commentary in the Argentine newspaper “La Nación.”
But what was most striking about that papal trip to Cuba in 2015 was Francis’s complete silence about the victims of the Castrist regime, about the thousands of Cubans swallowed up by the sea as they tried to escape from tyranny, and his refusal to meet with members of the opposition.
In 1998 one of these, when John Paul II was visiting Cuba, even managed to go up to the altar to bring the offerings during Mass in the Plaza de la Revolución, while from the square there came the loud and rhythmic cry of “Libertad!”, a word the pope uttered thirteen times in his homily.
In 2015 none of this. The Castrist police screened and registered everyone admitted to Francis’s Masses, in Havana as in other cities, as well as mixing in squads of snitches belonging to the party. And in the nine speeches of his visit to Cuba, Bergoglio pronounced the word “libertad” only once, as if out of official duty.
Pressed by journalists on the flight back from Cuba regarding his failure to meet with dissidents, Francis replied as follows:
“First of all it was quite clear that I would not give any audience to the dissidents, because they were not the only ones asking for an audience, but also people from other sectors, including several heads of state. No, it was not anticipated that there would be any audience: neither with dissidents, nor with others. Second: from the nunciature there were telephone calls to some people who are part of this group of dissidents. The nuncio’s task was to inform them that with pleasure, upon my arrival at the cathedral, I would greet those who were there. But since no one showed up for the greeting, I don’t know if they were there or not.”
In reality the dissidents were not there at all, as the police had identified all of them and turned them away.
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As for Nicaragua, memory goes back to the head-on clash in 1983 between John Paul II and the Sandinista revolutionary regime of the time, stuffed with priests turned officials, a clash that culminated in orchestrated hostile cries from the crowd against the pope, during the closing Mass.
Still on top in Nicaragua is the unbudgeable Daniel Ortega, with his wife Rosario Murillo as vice-president. But the Catholic Church has undergone a reversal of fortune. It is no longer half in the service of the regime through the activity of its clergy, militant and opposed to a John Paul II identified with the neo-colonial powers, but is wholly persecuted and humiliated, with only Pope Francis brazenly lauded by Ortega as a “friend of the Sandinista revolution.”
The trouble is that Francis does not back away from this unscrupulous use of his person by Ortega. He has never employed a word in public in defense of the Nicaraguan Church.
A timid protest not from the pope but from the Vatican offices arose only when Ortega last March expelled the pontifical nuncio, Poland’s Waldemar Stanislaw Sommerga, from Nicaragua, demanding that he leave the country immediately upon being notified of the provision. The Vatican responded to the news with a statement on March 12 expressing “great surprise and regret.”
The trouble is that the nuncio, on the mandate of the pope, had long negotiated with Ortega without ever obtaining anything, losing the approval of the country’s bishops and essentially of the entire Nicaraguan Church.
Not only that. The bishops most disliked by the regime have even received death threats. Against the most pugnacious of these, Managua auxiliary Silvio Báez, the regime lodged the false accusation of plotting a coup d’état, and Ortega asked Francis to call him back into line. Against his will, the pope transferred him in 2019 from Managua to Rome, with the promise of assigning him a place in the Vatican curia. But nothing was done and today Báez is living in exile in Miami, still committed to the freedom of his country.
The fact is that today Nicaragua is one of the countries in the world where the Catholic Church is most persecuted. There is no counting the killings, arrests, military assaults on churches where opponents seek shelter. One bishop, Rolando Álvarez, went on a fast last May in protest against the repression.
In early July the regime did not even spare the sisters of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. It ordered their immediate expulsion from the country. On July 6 the first fifteen crossed on foot the southern border with Costa Rica, which a few days before had been visited by the Vatican secretary for relations with states, Paul Richard Gallagher.
But not even in the official Vatican memo that gave an account of Gallagher’s trip, published that same July 6, did there appear the slightest mention of the expulsion of the sisters of Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
On the persecution in Nicaragua, the silence of the See of Peter is ever more deafening.
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Ping
Friends?
More like fellow traveler fiends.
Catholic priests seem to like communist dictators
Ortega and the Sandanistas found many men of the cloth as supporters back in the 70s and 80s.
You’ve confused Catholic priests with Jesuit priests. The two are not the same.
True words
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