Bishop Álvarez, the rebel priest whom Daniel Ortega wants to banish

Bishop Rolando Álvarez.Luis Grañena

It is not the first time that Bishop Rolando José Álvarez has been imprisoned.

In the early hours of August 19, 2022, when a convoy of policemen with rifles captured him in the curia of Matagalpa, a northern city of Nicaragua, the religious leader somehow relived the imprisonment he suffered in the 1980s for his opposition to Compulsory military service, imposed at that turbulent time by the Sandinistas to confront the Contra guerrillas financed by the United States.

The difference is that when he was arrested in the 1980s he was a 16-year-old who began his religious life in a pastoral ministry in Managua and not the renowned bishop he is today.

Monsignor Rolando Álvarez —already 55 years old— is one of the most uncomfortable voices in the Nicaraguan Catholic Church for the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.

They have persecuted him for several years until imposing, after several police fences and kidnappings, house by jail in a context of rampant religious persecution in this Central American country.

The presidential couple, who govern with an iron fist, have declared Álvarez a sworn enemy.

Before ordering his arrest, they opened an investigation for "attempting to organize violent groups and carry out acts of hatred against the population."

The bishop, who directs the diocese of Matagalpa and runs that of Estelí, the two main dioceses in northern Nicaragua, has committed "crimes against spirituality," according to the vice president, Rosario Murillo.

Under these indications, the police were ordered to kidnap the bishop for 15 days in the curia of Matagalpa.

Along with other priests, seminarians and laity, he resisted a fierce confinement.

The police did not even allow the passage of food and medicine.

The police kidnapping began on August 3, when officers forbade him to go to the Matagalpa cathedral to say mass.

Monsignor Álvarez tried to break the police cordon with the Blessed Sacrament in hand.

“Officer, may I give you a hug?

We are brothers, love one another as I have loved;

a hug, officer, your authorities are not going to scold you, ”he said to the agents who were fleeing from him and his sermon.

This episode largely summarizes Bishop Rolando Álvarez: a religious highly critical of human rights violations in Nicaragua, worsened since 2018 with the violent dismantling of the social protests that shook the country and the Ortega-Murillo government that year.

A charismatic religious and close to the parishioners of Matagalpa, a mountain and peasant area, in whose communities Monsignor Álvarez could be seen at least three times a week riding donkeys, eating beans, dancing, cleaning churches and giving a gospel based on humanism and against oppression.

“Freedom” is a word that Monsignor Álvarez loves.

He told this chronicler in 2015 in the Matagalpa curia, during an interview following the march that he then called against a mining project in the municipality of Rancho Grande.

Some 15,000 people attended the mobilization, and the Government was forced to declare the concession granted to a Canadian transnational unfeasible.

"A person who lives without freedom, who submits, has no dignity," he said while eating a potato stew.

In a Nicaragua silenced by the yoke of persecution, harassment, the threat of jail and exile, Bishop Álvarez's homilies were the sum of defiant and rebellious verbs that go viral on social networks.

During one of his last masses in police captivity, broadcast through social networks, the religious called to “pray without fear”: “We yearn for a heart where no one threatens, blackmails and coerces;

a heart where we can all freely express our thoughts, our ideas, where we can all live as brothers”.

The bishop's rebellion dates back to his youth.

After his first jail sentences for opposing enlistment in compulsory military service, he went into exile in Guatemala as a refugee.

In exile he finished his high school studies and entered the seminary, which led him to the priesthood.

Monsignor Álvarez has said that he is inspired by Saint John Paul II, a "traveling pope, humanist and critic who, without departing from religion, has an impact on political issues."

He was named Bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa when he was 44 years old.

At that time, he was number 11 among the youngest monsignors in the world.

He was one of the first bishops to open a WhatsApp line to listen to parishioners.

As part of the Episcopal Conference, he criticized the autocratic drift of Ortega and his wife.

He demanded free elections, democratic institutions, and then roared against the murders and violence in the country.

He has been under house arrest for two weeks, in total incommunicado detention.

His homilies have been silenced.

Everything points to forced exile.

He hates it and has settled it this way: "I'm not going to leave my country!"

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