Nicaraguans Face a Dark Christmas of Communist Repression as War on Christians Continues
Millions of Nicaraguans will spend Christmas under the growing repression of communist dictator Daniel Ortega, who has arrested and banished members of the Catholic Church, prohibited Catholic festivities, and intimidated Christians into silence.
Nicaraguans are a majority Catholic people. Out of the country’s roughly 6.35 million citizens, 50 percent identify as Roman Catholic and 33.2 percent identify as Evangelical Christian. Another 2.9 percent identify as practitioners of other religions.
Ortega, who himself claims to be Catholic, has maintained a fierce animosity against the Catholic Church throughout the four decades of Sandinista rule in Nicaragua, declaring a “war” against the Vatican in 2022 and openly stating that he has never held any respect for the Church’s bishops.
Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have used the full might of the Sandinista regime they rule to punish the Nicaraguan Catholic Church for its support of pro-democracy dissidents during 2018’s wave of peaceful protests, when thousands of Nicaraguans flocked to the streets calling for the end of four decades of communist rule.
The Church’s support of the pro-democracy dissidents led to Ortega branding Catholic bishops “terrorists,” accusing them of conspiring to stage a coup. Ortega also claims that the Church was “covering up [for] a gang of assassins” that, according to him, tried to assassinate him in 2018.
The Ortega regime’s “punishment” of the Catholic Church started as violent assaults against Catholic churches in Nicaragua carried out by Sandinistas on behalf of the ruling regime. It has now morphed into full-blown regime persecution of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church, dramatically escalating in 2022 and 2023.
The Ortega regime has banned the Nicaraguan Catholic Church from celebrating its traditional festivities and processions. Public celebrations of the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the feast of the Immaculate Conception became the latest additions to a growing list of banned celebrations ahead of this year’s Christmas season.
Nicaraguan authorities repeatedly claim that the prohibitions are necessary for “public security” reasons, providing no evidence for how these peaceful religious activities allegedly pose a threat. Such warnings prevent the faithful from freely exercising their religious freedom.
During Lent in 2023, the Ortega regime banned all Holy Week processions nationwide, including the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross) processions that commemorate Jesus Christ’s last day on Earth prior to resurrection.
In 2022, Catholic processions for Saints Michael and Jerome and La Purisima and La Griteria, unique Nicaraguan celebrations that honor the Blessed Mother Mary, were also banned.
Journalists who “dare” to cover their local Catholic festivities are subject to the Sandinista regime’s retaliation. Such is the case of Nicaraguan reporter Victor Ticay, who police arrested in his hometown of Nandaime for the “crime” of covering La Reseña, a centuries-old local Catholic procession celebrated in Nandaime during Holy Week, and publishing footage of the event on social media.
Ticay was sentenced in August to eight years in prison on “spreading fake news,” “conspiracy to undermine national integrity,” and “treason” charges.
When it comes to repression against members of the Nicaraguan Church, the most significant case is the arrest and sentencing of of the Bishop of Matagalpa, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, an outspoken critic of Ortega who has been held asa political prisoner since August 2022.
Álvarez was arrested in August 2022 alongside seven other members of the Catholic Church at the end of a two-week long police raid on the priest’s house. Days before his arrest, Murillo accused Álvarez of having committed “sins against spirituality.”
Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years in prison for “treason” in February and was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship, rendering him a stateless person — an act that is in clear violation of international law. Álvarez’s lawyer, Yonarqui de los Ángeles Martínez García, was permanently barred from practicing law in May.
As of December 17, Álvarez has spent over 500 days in prison.
Last week, 63-year-old Bishop Isidoro del Carmen Mora Ortega (no relation to the dictator) was arrested, becoming the second bishop behind bars in the country.
Bishop Mora’s “crime” was that he had offered prayers for Álvarez alongside members of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference. The Bishop was reportedly intercepted by the Nicaraguan Police when he was on his way to the Santa Cruz parish, where he planned to preside over the Confirmation of 230 parishioners, according to local sources.
In November, several members of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church who have been persecuted recounted their harrowing experiences to Congress. The witnesses detailed how they were arrested, interrogated, and brutalized by the communist regime, which accused them of being part of an “organized crime” syndicate simply for being Catholic.
“We were accused of being members of an organized crime gang and that the leaders were the bishops, and above all they said Rolando [Álvarez]. I was accused of undermining the dignity of the state and of Nicaragua, of spreading false news,” one of the witnesses said.
Álvarez is the first Catholic priest to be arrested following Ortega’s return to power in 2007. Since his arrest and sentence, the priest has only been shown in pictures and footage released by the Ortega regime that show Álvarez looking visibly thin. Álvarez remains imprisoned in La Modelo, located in the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Managua. La Modelo is infamously known for the torture and beating of prisoners that occurs on a daily basis.
The seven men arrested in the raid on Álvarez’s home — four priests, two seminarians, and a layman — were sentenced to ten years in prison in February on “treason” and “fake news” charges.
In October, Catholic priests Julio Ricardo Norori and Iván Centeno were kidnapped by Nicaraguan police forces dressed in civilian clothing while they were in their respective churches.
Other members of the Catholic Church were banished instead of arrested in 2022, including the papal nuncio, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, and 18 nuns from the Missionaries of Charity congregation. Monsignor Silvio Báez fled Nicaragua in 2019 at the request of Pope Francis after several threats made to Báez’s security.
In 2022, the Ortega regime began to forcefully shut down Catholic television and radio stations. As of November 2023, at least 15 Catholic media outlets have been closed down along the dozens of dissident media outlets shutdown or seized by the communist Ortega regime.
The regime froze the Nicaraguan Catholic Church’s bank assets and seized or shut down Catholic-led universities throughout the country. The Jesuit order-run Central American University (UCA) of Managua was completely seized by the regime in August. The John Paul II University and the Autonomous Christian University of Nicaragua (UCAN) were shut down by the regime in March.
Much like the socialist Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Ortega regime persecution includes not just silencing real Catholic voices, but hijacking the faith in the service of socialism.
Ortega and his wife Murillo, after banning the festivities of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, celebrated their own socialist version of the festivity last week, in which Murillo accused the Catholic Church and dissidents of her husband’s communist regime as spreading “terrorist hate.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Christians in Northern India Forgo Christmas Celebrations After ‘Record’ Year of Persecution
The Hindu nationalist government of India presided over the escalation of Christian persecution in the country at a “record pace” in 2023, religious freedom experts told Breitbart News, and faces little to no pressure to protect their Christian populations from the West.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly claimed in public — including on the lawn of the White House in June — that India is not a hotbed of persecution or violence against religious minorities.
“I’m actually really surprised that people say so. And so, people don’t say it. Indeed, India is a democracy,” Modi said while standing next to President Joe Biden during a visit to Washington this year. “We have always proved that democracy can deliver. And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”
In reality, Hindu nationalists organized mob attacks on Christian communities throughout the year, burning down churches and often destroying entire neighborhoods, leaving Christians displaced. The worst of the violence in 2023 occurred in Manipur, northern India, where members of the majority Hindu Meitei tribe went on a rampage against majority Christian Kuki-Zo communities throughout the spring and summer, often filming their atrocities. Modi’s government did not comment on the matter until a video went viral in the rest of the country showing a mob of presumably Meitei men raping Christian women in broad daylight and parading them naked through the streets.
“The police were there with the mob which was attacking our village,” one of the assaulted women revealed in an anonymous interview in July. “The police picked us up from near home and took us a little away from the village and left us on the road with the mob. We were given to them by police.”
At least tens of thousands of people remain displaced in Manipur as of September, according to the United Nations.
As a result, Christmas celebrations will be largely absent in Manipur, local media reported Thursday.
“The violence continues. In this environment, nobody can celebrate Christmas, or any other festival like before,” Manipur local Helamboi Baite told the Indian outlet. “It won’t be the same for us. Maybe, families would have a somber celebration inside their homes, but I don’t think any gathering will take place in the streets.”
Manipur Christians held a mass funeral for the remains of 87 people killed in the mob violence erupting in May on December 19; they had not received the remains of their loved ones before then.
“The youngest tribal victim in the ongoing violence is one-month-old Isaac, while the oldest is 87-year-old Veinem Chongloi,” the Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum (ITLF), a Kuki-Zo organization, said in a statement, according to The Print.
The outburst of anti-Christian violence in Manipur followed a protest by Christians in New Delhi in February in which a crowd of between 15,000 and 20,000 people demanded the Modi government act to protect Christian communities.
“We’ve gathered here peacefully because we want to share the anguish of our fellow citizens who follow the Christian faith in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and so many other places where their basic fundamental rights are being snatched,” said the United Christian Forum, a human rights group participating in the rally.
“The Brahmins that sit atop the cultural landscape of India (Prime Minister Modi and his political party, the BJP) see Christianity as a direct threat to their status and power and are therefore intent on strangling it,” Jeff King, the president of International Christian Concern (ICC) and author of The Last Words of the Martyrs, told Breitbart News. “Modi is a very savvy world-leading politician that will never be seen making anti-Christian comments. His main job is to stay silent in response to attacks on Christians.”
“Violence against Christians this year continued at a record pace,” he explained, “and will eclipse the 600 recorded attacks in 2022. Large-scale riots by radical Hindus in Chhattisgarh and Udar Pradesh displaced thousands of Christians and destroyed hundreds of homes and churches earlier this year, beginning in the late fall of 2022.”
“Because of Modi and his government’s inaction in Manipur, we saw an incredible outbreak of anti-Christian violence,” King continued. “Christians suffered greatly under the brutal attacks and hundreds of churches were targeted. While it’s been difficult to get accurate information from the region because of the government’s lockdown, by summer 200-400 Christian churches, including at least two dozen Meiti churches, and dozens of temples had been destroyed along more than 3,500 houses.”
“Just in the last 12 months, you have massive riots in Chhattisgarh against churches and of course in Manipur in the north, where over 350 churches were destroyed,” David Curry, the president and CEO of Global Christian Relief, told Breitbart News in a recent conversation. “And when you think of it, that’s a lot of churches, that is a lot of people who have been displaced, hundreds of thousands — and the government has done little to nothing about it.”
“They wouldn’t even acknowledge it was happening until a video escaped of that young Christian girl being raped caused such an uproar. So it’s shameful,” he added, urging the U.S. government to pressure “friends” such as India and Nigeria, where jihadist terrorists regularly destroy Christian communities, to address the safety and freedom of Christians at home.
Biden welcomed Modi to Washington for a state dinner, the highest honor for a foreign head of government, in June. The leaders exchanged personal gifts and Modi signed a range of agreements with both Washington and American companies, prominently a deal to jointly manufacture jet engines with General Electric. The Biden administration was careful not to condemn Modi’s handling of mob violence against Christians in his country, instead hailing India as a “vibrant democracy” and worthy partner.
“I think what the American government should do is start with our friends and I put Nigeria and India in that category because these are countries which, by all rights, are democracies,” Curry told Breitbart News. “They’re going to want to have relationships with us and we should use that friendship and all of the hundreds of millions — and ,who knows, even billions of dollars — that we are putting into security and so forth in these countries to create a stronger human rights and religious freedom environment.”
“But India is going the other way despite all that we are doing with them and for them, military contracts, et cetera, business contracts,” he observed. “They — the government, the administration in charge there — is targeting Christians and Muslims, any religious minorities, those that are not Hindus and creating a very difficult environment for them.”
“We need to draw a tough line on religious persecution,” he urged.
King, of ICC, predicted violence against Christians in India would continue unabated without outside pressure.
“Until India’s business interests and Western capital flows are affected, the hate speech and anti-Christian activities urged on by Modi (silently) and the BJP (openly) will continue or keep growing,” he told Breitbart News.
Nigerian Christians, Forgotten by the West, Face Christmas Under the Shadow of Jihadist Genocide
Christians in Nigeria will celebrate Christmas this year facing a relentless onslaught of jihadist terrorism seeking to eliminate them from the country, experts told Breitbart News, with little support from their government.
In the northeast, Nigerian Christians have endured decades of attacks by Boko Haram, the Islamic State-affiliated terrorist organization committed to killing Christians and forcing young girls into sex slavery “marriages” with their fighters. In the central Middle Belt, jihadists belonging to the majority-Muslim Fulani ethnic group regularly conduct raids on Christian communities, burning down entire villages and occupying land historically populated by Christian majorities. The objective in both cases is the genocide of Nigerian Christians and the establishment of a sharia “caliphate” system.
International Christian Concern named Nigeria the world’s top oppressor of Christians in its 2023 report — the world’s most dangerous place to be a Christian — as a result of the “20-year genocide against Christians” there by Boko Haram, the Fulani, and other jihadist elements.
“You have to distinguish between the tribe and the group of extremists within that category. With that understanding, the Fulani feel as though all of a certain territory belongs to them by right, by history, and you might say they view it as their God-given caliphate,” David Curry, the president and CEO of Global Christian Relief, told Breitbart News, “because they have a theology. This is not just a tribal issue, this is not just a land issue, and it’s not a climate issue, as is sometimes stated … No, this is, they view this as their God-given right.”
The persecution has plagued the country for years with little or no intervention from the government and, unlike in many other parts of the world where Christians face genocidal action, even though they make up a significant percentage of the population. While a slight plurality of Nigerians are Muslim, about 45 percent of the country belongs to some form of Christian church.
It largely occurs in the form of raids of Christian communities, in both north and central Nigeria, by jihadist attackers who kill and abduct as many Christians as possible — then take their homes and settle in their land.
“Last Christmas, essentially, there was a spate of attacks where something like 100 plus people were attacked, unfortunately the numbers are always inexact,” Edward Clancy, the director of outreach for the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, told Breitbart News in a recent interview, naming the Middle Belt state of Benue as a particularly troubling hotspot of genocidal violence.
“There’s, I believe, like 3 and a half to 4 million people in the state – and like 2 million plus, over 2 million are displaced,” he explained. “So it is not a good place to be on the outskirts. For example, the Diocese of Makurdi, they’ve lost 14 parishes.”
“Now 14 parishes — people in North America we hear about parishes merging, closing, things like that,” he continued. “This is a place in Nigeria where first of all a parish is not just one building, it’s oftentimes two, three, four, even a dozen buildings because it’s such a large area that a parish can represent 10 or 12 places of worship. So the diocese has lost 14 of these parishes and when we say lost, we mean like lost territory, there are Christians being forced out so there are no more residents there.”
“In one four-month span this year, more than 50 separate attacks killed over 500 Christians. Not a week goes by that Christians aren’t brutally kidnapped, tortured, and killed in the Middle Belt,” Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern (ICC), explained to Breitbart News this week. “The adoption of Sharia criminal law in 12 northern states has contributed to the ongoing persecution of Christians in the region.”
These descriptions of Benue are consistent with that given to Breitbart News in July by Father Remigius Ihyula, a university chaplain and emergency relief coordinator in the Diocese of Makurdi.
“These killings have been consistent. We have documented atrocities that have risen to the level of genocide against our people,” Father Ihyula told Breitbart News. “People, women and children, are killed on a daily basis. They are butchered, they have been driven from their homes, some have been living in camps for about ten years. They cannot go back to their homes.”
In northeast Nigeria — particularly in Borno state, the birthplace of Boko Haram, Christians face similar routine abductions, mass killings, bombings, and other attacks.
Curry of Global Christian Relief lamented in a recent conversation with Breitbart News that the new Nigerian government offered “a lot of lip service,” but no significant action to protect Christian populations. Having recently returned from northeast Nigeria, Curry said camps of internally displaced Christians — whose homes had been destroyed by jihadists — were largely left with no state protection.
“So the camps that I visited, none of them were protected. They were all vulnerable. They remain vulnerable, and the government seems to be doing little to stop the incursion of Boko Haram,” he explained. “Now, at one point, I was 15 minutes away, I was at a camp that was 15 minutes from a Boko Haram headquarters and the government knows they’re there. They know what they’ve done, and they allow them to remain. It’s outrageous.”
“So in this case, it could be that the regional leaders, unless there is an imminent danger to the general population, are not going to care if these Christians are attacked,” Curry said. “That sounds outrageous except when you see it firsthand, you can’t imagine why they don’t have protection around these camps where Christians have already been traumatized and also why they’re not policing the area.”
“They don’t have any helicopters on site to observe the movements of Boko Haram, who clearly exist 15 minutes from their camp,” he added.
Politicians at the national level often do not need to appeal to Christian voting blocs to stay in power and ignore their concerns entirely.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari, an ethnic Fulani Muslim who previously ruled as a military dictator, claimed in 2015 that Nigeria had “won the war” against Boko Haram and largely refused to acknowledge its existence in his eight years in power. His successor, fellow Muslim Bola Tinubu, broke with the tacit tradition of choosing a Christian vice presidential running mate and has not made any major moves to curtail genocidal activity against Christians in the country since taking office this year.
“The Nigerian government cannot be trusted on this subject,” Curry told Breitbart News. “Either their political alliances or moral framework has not allowed them to really go after these terrorists. … I don’t know whether it’s political alliances or just moral bankruptcy but the government is not protecting these Christians in these regions in the north.”
“Fundamentalist Muslims are in control of all the security organs of State including the police, the military, and intel agencies,” King, of ICC, said. “Fundamentalist Muslim actors embedded in the security apparatus of the Nigerian State in Nigeria have aided and abetted the Muslim Fulani’s slow-moving anti-Christian genocide and/or jihad for two decades now.”
King was nonetheless slightly more positive towards Tinubu, expressing a “glimmer of hope” in his administration.
“The new president has a Christian wife and has appointed several Christian heads of state. The president has also begun implementing increased military efforts against Fulani militants,” he said, “and has disappointed the extreme Islamic north, which has been facing economic challenges since his appointment.”
Clancy, of Aid to the Church in Need, lamented that the lack of improvement, “just based on that alone,” makes for a worse situation for Christians “because this will have a cumulative effect.”
“It’s worse because this will have a cumulative effect of year after year after year of wearing people down, destroying communities, making these little villages on the outskirts of states or not so close to the cities become devoid of any Christian presence,” he explained. “Up in Maiduguri, which is up in the northeast in Borno, which is the birthplace of Boko Haram. Maiduguri is essentially the Christian center of a very Muslim area of the country.”
“And there, there are neighbors, communities in that region. And again, Christians have left and you have this area where it might be a mix of Christians and Muslims, farmers, living near each other in relatively in peace,” he continued, “and now you have these Christian families that can’t even go to their farms because it’s not safe and if they do go to their farms and do any farming, they can’t go to the markets because the markets are not safe.”
“These areas could literally become devoid of Christians,” he warned.
The threats have yet to succeed in eliminating Christianity completely, however, and Nigerians will continue to celebrate in the face of threats, the experts agreed.
“In the areas I was at, there is a strong population, if not the majority, of Christians and they’re going to celebrate Christmas,” Curry said, “but they’re going to do it in the posture of vulnerability because they know at any minute they could be attacked for their faith.”
“And certainly Christmas for many persecuted believers is something that they have to sort of practice and celebrate underground. But in Nigeria, by and large, they will celebrate in their homes, but it won’t necessarily be underground,” he added.
“The amazing thing is that Nigerians in Nigeria will celebrate Christmas with all of this going on,” Clancy concurred, “with the attacks that happened in Pentecost last year and then the attacks that happened earlier this year around Christmas … they still continue.”
“They still continue doing their jobs, filling their vocations, living their Christian lives, and the churches for the most part will be filled and they will be very joyful and they will celebrate,” he noted. “And for us in the West, we have to look at that not only as joy in the face of persecution and suffering but also the bravery, the fact that they are in a sense undaunted by what we would think, ‘ok I’m leaving.'”
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