The Catholic Church Under the Ortega Government

Confrontation between the Catholic Church and the government of President Daniel Ortega sharpened after 2018, when the church offered its buildings and its bishops as mediators during nationwide protests that the government suppressed by force. In the years that followed, the government stripped legal status from hundreds of religious orders, charities and Catholic media outlets, expelled foreign missionaries and men and women religious, and in 2022 expelled the Vatican's own ambassador to the country.

The clearest case is Bishop Rolando Alvarez of Matagalpa. Police raided his diocesan offices in August 2022 after he refused to board a flight expelling fellow clergy, and held him first under house arrest and then in Managua's La Modelo prison. In February 2023 a Nicaraguan court convicted him of treason and related charges in a closed proceeding and sentenced him to more than twenty six years in prison. He was released in January 2024 along with eighteen other priests and seminarians and flown into exile in Rome, having initially refused a mass deportation of political prisoners rather than leave his diocese voluntarily.

Rights bodies including the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom have documented the case as part of a wider pattern of state pressure on Nicaragua's Catholic hierarchy that continues.