EWTN News portal reports on a panel discussion held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., on May 29, 2026, where Rosalia Gutierrez-Huete Miller, president of the Nicaragua Freedom Coalition, lamented the “silence” surrounding the persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua under the Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo dictatorship. Miller described government vetting of homilies, surveillance of churches by spies, the cancellation of Holy Week processions, and the general repression of religious freedom. She quoted Monsignor Silvio José Báez, auxiliary bishop of Managua, as saying the status of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua is “silence.” The article, while ostensibly reporting on genuine persecution, is framed entirely within the naturalistic, human-rights-based discourse of the post-conciliar Church, reducing a profound spiritual crisis to a matter of political oppression and failing to address the deeper theological and ecclesial rot that enables such persecution to flourish unchallenged by the very structures that should be the Church’s bulwark.
The Silence of Ortega’s Persecution and the Complicity of a Dying Church
A Persecution Real but Superficially Understood
There is no denying the grim reality: Catholics in Nicaragua suffer under the yoke of a Marxist dictatorship. The Ortega-Murillo regime, a grotesque caricature of the godless state condemned repeatedly by the Church’s authentic Magisterium, has indeed silenced priests, surveilled homilies, banned processions, and revoked the citizenship of faithful Catholics like Rosalia Gutierrez-Huete Miller. These are facts, and they are deplorable. Yet the manner in which this persecution is presented — by EWTN News, by Miller, and by the very “bishops” she cites — reveals a catastrophic failure to understand the true nature of the crisis. The article treats the persecution as though it were an aberration, an external assault upon a healthy Church, rather than the inevitable fruit of decades of internal decay, modernist infiltration, and the systematic dismantling of the Church’s supernatural mission.
Miller recounts: “Everything has to be vetted by the government, especially what priests are going to preach on Sunday,” and notes the presence of spies recording homilies for deviation. This is indeed a horrifying image — but the question that must be asked, and that the article dare not ask, is: what are these priests preaching that the government fears? If the homilies being vetted are the vapid, naturalistic, social-justice-oriented platitudes that have characterized the post-conciliar “Church” for decades, one must wonder what threat they pose to any regime, Marxist or otherwise. The authentic preaching of the integral Catholic faith — the faith that proclaims the Social Kingship of Christ, the necessity of conversion, the reality of sin and hell, the exclusive salvific mission of the Catholic Church — has always provoked the wrath of earthly powers. “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). The fact that the Ortega regime finds it necessary to vet homilies suggests either that some remnant of true Catholic preaching persists, or — more disturbingly — that the regime perceives even the weakened post-conciliar message as a threat to its totalitarian control. Neither possibility is explored.
The “Silence” of Monsignor Báez: A Symptom of Conciliar Cowardice
Miller quotes Monsignor Silvio José Báez, auxiliary bishop of Managua, as saying the status of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua is “silence.” This admission, presented as a lament, is in fact a devastating indictment — not of the Ortega regime, but of the conciliar hierarchy itself. For decades, the post-conciliar “Church” has been silent about the most fundamental truths of the faith: the necessity of conversion to the Catholic Church for salvation, the reality of the Social Kingship of Christ over all nations, the condemnation of communism and socialism, the obligation of Catholic states to profess and protect the true religion. This silence did not begin in Nicaragua; it began in the halls of the Second Vatican Council and has been the defining characteristic of the conciliar sect ever since.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), proclaimed with unmistakable clarity: “The rulers of states… if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness… let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people.” He further declared that “when God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The “silence” of Monsignor Báez is not a new phenomenon; it is the natural consequence of a “Church” that has abandoned its prophetic mission in favor of dialogue, ecumenism, and accommodation with the world. The same “Church” that refuses to condemn communism by name, that treats Marxism as a legitimate partner in the pursuit of “social justice,” that has emptied its seminaries of orthodox teaching and filled them with liberation theology — this “Church” now feigns surprise when a Marxist dictatorship turns its repressive apparatus against it.
Moreover, the very fact that Miller must travel to Washington, D.C., to plead her case before the Center for Strategic and International Studies — a secular think tank — rather than finding a powerful, unified voice of Catholic resistance within the Church’s own hierarchy, speaks volumes. Where is the anathema? Where is the excommunication of Ortega and Murillo? Where is the solemn, public condemnation of the regime in the name of Christ the King? The answer is that the conciliar “Church” has no such weapons at its disposal, having long since surrendered them in the name of “dialogue” and “religious freedom” — the very errors condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (propositions 15, 18, 77, 78, 79, and 80).
The Human Rights Framework: A Naturalistic Straitjacket
The entire framing of the article — a panel discussion at CSIS, references to “human rights violations,” the GHREN report — reveals the profound naturalism that has infected even those who claim to defend the faith. The persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua is presented as a “human rights” issue, as though the fundamental problem were the violation of civil liberties rather than the assault on the rights of God. This is the language of the post-conciliar Church, which has systematically replaced the supernatural order with the natural order, the rights of Christ the King with the rights of man, the salvation of souls with the promotion of “human dignity.”
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (proposition 80). Yet this is precisely the program that the conciliar “Church” has pursued for over six decades. The result is a “Church” that speaks the language of human rights, international law, and diplomatic engagement, but has lost the language of faith, dogma, and supernatural authority. When Miller laments the “silence” about Catholic persecution, she does not identify the root cause: the conciliar “Church” has no theological framework within which to understand or respond to persecution, because it has abandoned the very doctrines that would make such a response possible.
The authentic Catholic response to persecution is not to appeal to secular authorities or international bodies, but to proclaim the truth with courage and to suffer for it with fortitude. The martyrs of the early Church did not petition the Roman Senate for relief; they confessed Christ and died. The saints who resisted the encroachments of secular power — St. Thomas Becket, St. John Fisher, St. Peter Canisius — did not frame their resistance in terms of “human rights” but in terms of the rights of God and His Church. The conciliar “Church,” having abandoned this supernatural perspective, is left with nothing but the feeble instruments of secular diplomacy — instruments that are, by their nature, incapable of defending the faith.
The Cancellation of Holy Week Processions: A Symbol of Deeper Devastation
Miller laments the cancellation of traditional Holy Week processions, recalling their significance from her childhood: “I remember back to my childhood what that meant for a child, what it meant for the whole population — it was a joyous occasion. And now, they cannot do that.” She notes, however, that the faithful are holding processions inside churches, and this gives her encouragement. While the resilience of the Nicaraguan faithful is indeed admirable, the article fails to address a far more devastating reality: the post-conciliar “Church” itself has systematically gutted the very traditions that processions like these are meant to celebrate.
The conciliar reform, imposed globally since the late 1960s, has stripped the liturgy of its sacrificial character, replaced the traditional rites with a Protestantized “assembly,” suppressed the prayers for the conversion of Russia and the triumph of the Church, and emptied Catholic worship of its supernatural content. The Holy Week reforms of 1955 (under Pius XII) and especially those of 1969 (under the conciliar apparatus) fundamentally altered the meaning and expression of the Church’s worship. The processions that Miller remembers from her childhood — if they were truly traditional — were expressions of a faith that the conciliar “Church” has since abandoned. The Ortega regime’s cancellation of outdoor processions is a surface-level persecution; the conciliar revolution’s destruction of the liturgy is a far deeper and more insidious one.
Furthermore, the article’s reference to “traditional Holy Week processions” without any critical examination of what “traditional” means in the current context is telling. In the post-conciliar landscape, “traditional” has been co-opted by those who pretend to be traditional Catholics — the Lefebvrians, the indultists, and various other groups that, while preserving certain external forms, remain in communion with the conciliar sect and its usurping antipopes. The authentic tradition of the Church is not a matter of external rites alone but of integral doctrine, and the conciliar “Church” has betrayed that doctrine at its very foundations.
The Fear of Faith: Rosario Murillo and the Power of Truth
Miller observes: “I think that Rosario Murillo, she’s afraid of the power of the Nicaraguan faith. It’s values that shape their beliefs and commitments. She, as we know, needs to control and repress communities of faith in order to prevent the social process, and protests, because that immediately gives them cause for concern.” This is a perceptive observation, but it requires a deeper analysis. Murillo’s fear is not merely of “faith” in the abstract but of the specific content of the Catholic faith — a content that, when authentically preached and lived, is inherently subversive to any totalitarian regime.
The Catholic faith proclaims that there is a law higher than the law of the state, a King greater than any earthly ruler, a judgment more terrible than any human tribunal. It proclaims that the state exists to serve the common good, which is defined not by the will of the majority or the dictates of a party but by the eternal law of God. It proclaims that the Church is a perfect society, endowed by Christ with all the means necessary for its mission, and that no earthly power has the right to interfere with its governance, teaching, or worship. These are the truths that terrify dictators — not the watered-down, socially conscious, ecumenical “faith” of the conciliar “Church,” which poses no real threat to any regime because it has already surrendered the very principles that would make it dangerous.
Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” And further: “The entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” A state that professes these truths cannot be a totalitarian state, because it acknowledges a higher authority. Conversely, a state that suppresses the public profession of these truths — as Ortega’s Nicaragua does — reveals its fundamentally anti-Christian character. The tragedy is that the conciliar “Church” has done more to undermine these truths than any Marxist dictatorship ever could, by teaching that the state has no obligation to Christ, that all religions are equal, and that the Church must accommodate itself to the modern world.
The Complicity of the Conciliar Hierarchy
The article mentions Monsignor Báez as a voice of the suffering Church in Nicaragua, but it does not examine his record or the record of the Nicaraguan episcopate as a whole. The question that must be asked is: what has the Nicaraguan hierarchy done to prepare the faithful for persecution? Has it preached the integral faith? Has it condemned communism by name? Has it taught the faithful about the Social Kingship of Christ, the obligation of Catholic states to profess the true religion, the necessity of resisting unjust laws? Or has it, like the rest of the conciliar hierarchy, spent decades promoting ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, liberation theology, and the “preferential option for the poor” — all of which have served to weaken the faith of the faithful and leave them vulnerable to precisely the kind of persecution they now face?
The authentic Magisterium of the Church has always taught that persecution is a consequence of fidelity, not of infidelity. “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Timothy 3:12). But the conciliar “Church” has inverted this teaching, suggesting that persecution is a consequence of “intolerance” or “lack of dialogue” — as though the problem were not the persecutor’s hatred of the truth but the Church’s failure to accommodate it. This is the logic of the Syllabus of Errors in reverse: not the condemnation of error but the condemnation of those who refuse to tolerate it.
The Nicaraguan hierarchy, like the global conciliar hierarchy, bears a heavy responsibility for the current crisis. By failing to preach the truth, by failing to form the faithful in the integral faith, by failing to resist the encroachments of the state at every turn, it has left the Nicaraguan Catholics spiritually unarmed in the face of persecution. The “silence” that Miller laments is not merely the silence of fear; it is the silence of a hierarchy that has nothing to say because it has spent decades emptying the faith of its content.
The EWTN Framework: Persecution Without Theology
The article itself, published by EWTN News, is a textbook example of post-conciliar journalism: it reports on persecution without providing any theological analysis, it quotes “bishops” without questioning their orthodoxy, it frames the crisis in terms of “human rights” rather than the rights of God, and it offers no supernatural remedy for the suffering of the faithful. This is not accidental; it is the inevitable product of a media apparatus that is itself embedded within the conciliar sect and subject to its theological and pastoral directives.
EWTN, despite its claims of fidelity, operates within the framework of the post-conciliar “Church.” It recognizes the authority of the usurping antipopes, it promotes the conciliar liturgy alongside the traditional Mass, and it frames all issues — including persecution — within the naturalistic, human-rights-based paradigm of the conciliar revolution. The result is coverage that is factually accurate in its surface details but theologically bankrupt in its analysis. The Nicaraguan Catholics deserve better than this; they deserve the full truth about the nature of their persecution, the reasons for it, and the supernatural means of resisting it.
The authentic Catholic response to the persecution in Nicaragua — and everywhere else — is not to appeal to the United Nations or to secular think tanks, but to return to the unchanging doctrine of the Church: the Social Kingship of Christ, the necessity of conversion, the obligation of states to profess the true religion, the reality of sin and judgment, the exclusive salvific mission of the Catholic Church. These are the truths that the conciliar “Church” has abandoned, and it is this abandonment — far more than the Ortega regime — that is the root cause of the current crisis.
Conclusion: The Silence That Screams
The “silence” that Monsignor Báez describes is real, but it is not merely the silence of a persecuted Church; it is the silence of a Church that has lost its voice. The conciliar revolution has gutted the Church of its doctrinal content, replaced its supernatural mission with a naturalistic humanism, and left it incapable of responding to the challenges of the modern world — whether those challenges come from Marxist dictatorships or from the far more insidious enemy within.
The Nicaraguan Catholics who continue to practice their faith in secret, who hold processions inside churches, who resist the Ortega regime at great personal cost — these faithful souls deserve the full truth. They deserve to know that the “Church” that claims to speak for them has betrayed the very truths for which they suffer. They deserve to know that the “bishops” who offer them “silence” are the same “bishops” who have spent decades dismantling the faith they now pretend to defend. And they deserve to know that the only true hope for Nicaragua — and for the world — lies not in human rights or international diplomacy but in the return to the integral Catholic faith, the faith of the Fathers, the faith of the martyrs, the faith that the conciliar sect has tried and failed to destroy.
“The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:5). The darkness of the Ortega regime is real, but it is a shadow compared to the darkness of the conciliar apostasy. Until the Church returns to the fullness of its mission — until it proclaims Christ the King without compromise, without silence, without apology — the persecution of the faithful will continue, and the “silence” will remain.
Source:
Nicaraguan advocate laments ‘silence’ about Catholic persecution (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 29.05.2026