It is difficult to decide which is more scandalous: if the decision of the Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega to shut down seven Catholic Church radio stations and order the house arrest of a bishop and his aides, or total silence from the pope on these attacks on his own people.

Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, shut down all seven radio stations Catholics on August 1. They were administered by the diocese of Matagalpa, a department in northern Nicaragua whose bishop, Rolando Álvarez, frequently criticizes the ruling couple’s human rights abuses. Hours after the radio stations were closed, police in Ortega broke into Divina Misericordia Parish in the town of Sébaco, Matagalpa, from where one of the radio stations operated. The parish broadcast live on Facebook the arrival and forced entry to the church of the police. A few days later, heavily armed police prevented the bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, and six Catholic priests accompanying him from leaving his residence to go to the cathedral to celebrate mass. The bishop and priests have since been under house arrest, the Catholic News Agency reported. Ortega-Murillo’s regime accuses Álvarez and his priests of trying to “organize violent groups” to destabilize the government. In March, the government expelled the papal nuncio, Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, from the country.

For anyone who has followed the news from Nicaragua, there is no doubt that Ortega is waging one of the greatest repressive campaigns against political dissent in the Western world. Desde principios de año, el régimen ha cerrado 1406 organizaciones no gubernamentales, que van desde pequeños grupos de production teatral hasta organizaciones beneficas con apoyo internacional que aseguran el acceso a servicios de salud y alimentos en uno de los países más pobres de América Latina, según the magazine Confidential from Nicaragua. The magazine, like virtually all other independent media, was shut down in Nicaragua and is published online from Costa Rica.

Ortega won re-election in a rigged election in November 2021, after banning the main opposition parties and imprisoning the seven main opposition candidates. All remain in jail or under house arrest to this day. In 2018, more than 300 Nicaraguans were killed and 2,000 injured by Ortega’s police and paramilitary troops during massive anti-government protests. When I interviewed Ortega at his Managua residence that year, he told me without batting an eyelid that human rights groups were lying and that only 195 people had died.

The magazine editor ConfidentialCarlos Fernando Chamorro told me this week that the reason Ortega is attacking the Catholic Church is probably that the Church is “the last space of civil society left in the country.” But what’s even harder to explain is why the pope didn’t condemn, or even mention, Ortega’s recent crackdown on his own church. The Vatican’s representative to the Organization of American States belatedly expressed the Holy See’s “concern” about events in Nicaragua, but the pope has yet to issue a statement on the matter.

“The silence of Pope Francis on the persecution suffered by the Catholic Church is inadmissible”, Tamara Taraciuk, Latin America expert with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, told me. “If the very members of the Nicaraguan Catholic clergy are risking their own lives and freedom to speak out against Ortega’s abuses, what is the Pope waiting for to speak out and support them?”

The pope’s silence on Nicaragua is just one of many surprising recent omissions From you. The pope has yet to visit Ukraine, victim of the biggest foreign invasion of Europe since World War II. Yet he recently found time to take a six-day trip to Canada, to apologize for Church abuses in the 19th century and 1970s. What was more important now? The Nicaraguan tragedy has been overshadowed in the news by the war in Ukraine, tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan and the scandal over the apparent theft of secret White House documents by former President Donald Trump. . But what is happening in Nicaragua should be denounced by defenders of democracy and human rights around the world, starting with the Pope.