‘Night of terror’ in Nicaragua: Dictatorship forces cloistered nuns to leave monasteries

The Metropolitan Cathedral Santiago Apóstol and the National Palace in Managua, Nicaragua. / Credit: Martin Thurnherr, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Lima Newsroom, Jan 30, 2025 / 17:35 pm (CNA).

The Nicaraguan dictatorship has forced the Poor Clare nuns to leave their monasteries in Managua and Chinandega in an action described by a well-known researcher as a “night of terror.” 

According to the newspaper Mosaico CSI, the dictatorship’s order was carried out on the night of Jan. 28, forcing some 30 cloistered nuns belonging to the Order of St. Clare to leave their monasteries.

An ecclesiastical source cited by the Nicaraguan newspaper states that the dictatorship’s envoys “first went to notify the sisters (in the Monastery of the Franciscan Poor Clare Sisters) in Managua and then went to Chinandega (to the Monastery of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary).”

“They were told they had to leave and they were allowed to take some of their belongings,” the source added.

Martha Patricia Molina, a lawyer, researcher, and author of the report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?” — which in its latest edition documents almost 1,000 attacks by the dictatorship against the Catholic Church in the Central American country since 2018 — described what happened as a “night of terror for the nuns.”

Molina noted on X that the dictatorship’s agents “only allowed them to take a few belongings, just enough for their hands. Most of the nuns are Nicaraguan. Their whereabouts are unknown.”

The researcher stated that “the legal personhood of the congregation was granted to them by the National Assembly in February 2004, but on May 19, 2023, it was arbitrarily canceled.”

In a Jan. 29 statement to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Molina said the nuns’ legal status was cancelled by “voluntary dissolution,” although “we already know that the ‘voluntary’ part doesn’t exist in the country but that the dictatorship forces them [to dissolve] under a state of siege.”

Bishop Álvarez’s residence in Matagalpa emptied out

On Jan. 28, the dictatorship also showed up at the chancery in Matagalpa, the residence of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who has been living in exile in Rome since January 2024, and removed all the goods, furniture, and equipment, including religious objects, from the place.

“It’s the same dictatorship that is taking these things away, because at least in [St. Aloysius Gonzaga] Major Seminary of Philosophy they didn’t allow them to take anything, they only let the seminarians take their personal things,” a layman from Matagalpa told Mosaico CSI.

Molina told ACI Prensa that everything they took was loaded onto “several white trucks used to remove all the belongings, like a cross. They [the onlookers] tell me that seeing that was painful.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.