ACI Prensa Staff, Mar 20, 2024 / 17:30 pm
With Holy Week just a few days away, Catholics in Nicaragua are preparing for religious celebrations in the midst of ongoing persecution of the faith by the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
For Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer and author of the Spanish-language report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?”, the regime “wants to completely eradicate the faith of the Catholic people in order to eliminate the Church.”
In a March 18 Facebook post, Molina reported that for Holy Week 2024, approximately 4,800 outdoor processions have been prohibited throughout the country (this figure includes processions on the four Fridays of Lent). Outdoor processions are a prominent and integral part of Hispanic Catholic piety.
Instead of outdoor processions, all the cathedrals of the dioceses in Nicaragua are holding processions inside, as is also the case for most parishes and chapels in the country.