The Government of Daniel Ortega, through the Ministry of the Family, condemned this Monday the support provided by the Nicaraguan diocese of Granada to the priest José Leonardo Urbina, sentenced to 30 years in prison for the crime of sexual abuse against a 14-year-old girl .
The Ministry of the Family expressed in a statement “its deep concern about the expressions and official communications of the Diocese of the Catholic Church of Granada, before the sentence issued by judicial authorities against José Leonardo Urbina, a priest who raped a girl.”
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Last Friday, one day after Urbina, 51, and pastor of the Perpetuo Socorro church in the city of Boaco (downtown), was sentenced to 30 years in prison, the Diocese of Granada issued a statement in which he expressed “His deepest pain and suffering upon learning of the sentence against Monsignor José Leonardo Urbina.”
He also asked the faithful to “continue praying” for his priests imprisoned in Nicaragua, who have numbered eight in the last four months, including Bishop Rolando Álvarez, for different reasons, plus three seminarians.
THE GOVERNMENT DECLARES THE BISHOP OF THE DIOCESE OF GRANADA IN “REBELLION”
In its statement, the Ministry of the Family “emphatically condemned the statements that the Catholic Church of Granada inconceivably defends a rapist priest.”
Likewise, the Family portfolio claimed “for these unprecedented expressions of the bishop (Jorge Solórzano) and the Diocese of Granada, which we consider in rebellion against the pastoral guidance of Pope Francis.”
Priest Urbina becomes the second priest to be convicted by the Nicaraguan Justice for common crimes.
Last May, the priest Manuel Salvador García Rodríguez, from the Jesús Nazareno parish, in the city of Nandaime (west), was arrested for an alleged attack on a woman and later sentenced to two years in prison.
The alleged victim denied having been attacked by the priest, for which she was charged by the Prosecutor for the crime of perjury, and found guilty by a judge.
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Six other priests, including Rolando Álvarez, bishop of the Matagalpa diocese and apostolic administrator of the Estelí diocese, both in northern Nicaragua, have been under arrest since August 19 after spending 15 days confined in a provincial episcopal palace. .
The National Police, led by Francisco Díaz, President Ortega’s brother-in-law, accuses Bishop Álvarez and the other five priests -among them Ramiro Tijerino, nephew of former Sandinista guerrilla and former police chief Doris Tijerino- of trying to “organize violent groups”, supposedly ” with the purpose of destabilizing the State of Nicaragua and attacking the constitutional authorities”, although at the moment they have not offered evidence.
“We demand, we demand, justice and reparation, on behalf of the Nicaraguan families with victims of sexual abuse and aberrations against children, adolescents and adult women, committed by characters who cannot be considered shepherds, even if they dress in habits that they wear. and they manipulate to protect their atrocities”, continued the Ministry of the Family.
“We demand public condemnation and that the victims of the macho and perverse atrocity of these characters be apologized,” he concluded.
Ortega has branded as “terrorists” the bishops who acted as mediators of a national dialogue with which a peaceful solution to the political and social crisis that the country has been experiencing since 2018 was sought.
