As I write this article, there is a forgotten being in the city of Matagalpa who has been harassed and imprisoned by the Nicaraguan regime for committing the crime of professing the faith of Christ. His name is Rolando Álvarez and he is a diocesan bishop. Diocesan priests do not belong to any religious order, they are appointed to serve parishes and depend on the hierarchical structure of each Catholic church in each nation whose territory is divided into dioceses. And while I watch the stoic fight of Bishop Alvarez, my mind plays the trick of going back in time.
The year was 1989, my boss Carlos Andrés Pérez, at that time president of Venezuela, was acting as a good officiant in the peace processes in Central America. On November 11 of that year, the FMLN, the umbrella organization of the insurrectionary movement in El Salvador, launched an offensive against the government of Alfredo Cristiani. Five days later, members of the Salvadoran army assassinated several Jesuit priests on the premises of the Jose Simeón Cana Central American University, including Ignacio Ellacuría, the philosophy and pedestal of the development of that university.
The reaction of the Catholic Church was immediate. From the Vatican through the Jesuit Principal Hans Kolvenbach and the heads of all religious orders, excluding Opus Dei, condemned the act and demanded justice. The pressures reached the very Congress of the United States in which a fraction of Parliament demanded the intervention of the North American state.
Today, however, the Pope, who has adopted the name of the most charitable saint in the Catholic Church, together with all the orders and hierarchies of the Catholic Church, remain rigorously silent in the face of the greatest attack by a regime on the institution of the Catholic Church. Because the harassment and imprisonment of Monsignor Alvarez was preceded by the freezing of the bank accounts of civil organizations of the Catholic Church dedicated to providing education, food and health services to households that are within the line of absolute poverty. Then the legal status of all these entities was suspended. As a finishing touch, the Ortega regime expelled Mother Teresa of Calcutta from the country “for being involved in subversive activities” and of course she was right to describe the transparent conduct;
Unfortunately, the abusive and degrading behavior of the Nicaraguan regime benefits from many silences. The first and loudest has been that of the Catholic Church, whose visible head does not react to the kidnapping of one of its servants. And when one tries to understand the roots of this silence, one finds a fact that for many goes unnoticed: in the Catholic Church there is great inequality among the members who serve it. Just as in the secular world there are corporate organizations that pool resources; they submit to a strategy and exercise political and social weight in the church there are orders. Those orders are those of the Jesuits; the Franciscans; the Dominicans, the Lasallians and more recently Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ. All these orders assert their rights and require them to respect their ability to mobilize resources; attract audiences and mobilize citizens. And these orders participate in the balances of power of the Vatican whose curia is made up of rival armies that constantly fight to expand their share of power. Alongside these orders are the diocesan priests who are appointed to serve a certain parish. Diocesan priests only count the meager budget of the diocese, the contributions of its faithful and the philanthropic donations of a parishioner who was lucky in life. Its circle of influence is the parish and the less exalted the parishes, the greater the dedication that diocesan priests must have and the less the resources to create institutions and networks that allow them to influence the decision-making of the church. Priests who are members of orders, on the other hand, enjoy the privilege of having centuries-old supporting institutions. These institutions are part of the fabric of the elites of every country and, therefore, have power resources and a high capacity to influence the societies in which they operate. The diocesans, on the other hand, are a kind of servants of the filth in the XXI century. As such, they lack the ability to influence decision-making in the church or in the societies in which they live. They are the forgotten of the earth as the silence of the Vatican and of the entire church proves it on the occasion of the persecution suffered by Bishop Alvarez in Matagalpa Nicaragua. And one wonders. Why doesn’t this Pope, who adheres so much to equality, start the practice within the Catholic Church?
*Beatrice Rangel is an Internationalist; Master in economic development, member of the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States
“The opinions published here are the sole responsibility of their author.”
