The Vatican confirmed this Thursday that it will receive the twelve priests who were released yesterday by the Nicaraguan dictatorship. Among them, however, is not the Bishop of Matagalpa, H.E. Rolando Álvarez, who has been in prison since February.
“I can confirm that the Holy See was requested to receive 12 priests from Nicaragua, recently released. The Holy See has accepted. They will be received by an official from the Secretariat of State in the afternoon and housed in facilities of the Diocese of Rome,” Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican Press Office, said in a statement.
The news of the release of the priests was given yesterday by the Nicaraguan government in a statement. In its text, the Sandinista regime points out that this had been achieved “with the intercession of high-level authorities of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua and in the Vatican.”
The released priests are Manuel Salvador García Rodríguez and José Leonardo Urbina Rodríguez, from the Diocese of Granada; Jaime Iván Montesinos Sauceda, from the Diocese of Matagalpa; and Fernando Israel Zamora Silva, from the Diocese of Siuna.
There are also priests Osman José Amador Guillén, Julio Ricardo Norori Jiménez, José Iván Centeno Tercero, Yessner Cipriano Pineda Meneses, Álvaro José Toledo Amador, and Pastor Eugenio Rodríguez Benavidez, all from the Diocese of Estelí.
The group of released priests is completed by Cristóbal Reynaldo Gadea Velásquez, from the Diocese of Jinotega; and Ramón Angulo Reyes, from the Diocese of Bluefields.
On October 15, eight of these priests were sent to the El Chipote torture prison.
H.E. Rolando Álvarez, who has become an emblematic case of the persecution against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, was sentenced to 26 years and 4 months in prison. The dictatorship accused him of being a “traitor to the country.”
The day before, the Apostolic Administrator of Estelí also refused to leave the country along with 222 other Nicaraguans who were deported to the United States.
Translated by Jacob Stein.
