The Jesuit priest José Maria Tojeira, director of the Institute of Human Rights of the Central American University “José Simeón Cañas” (UCA) of El Salvador, expressed his praise and solidarity with Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, bishop of Matagalpa, who has been prosecuted and imprisoned for the dictatorial regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
«Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, Bishop of Matagalpa in Nicaragua, has defended the rights of the poor in his diocese and has been a severe critic of the abuses committed by the current Nicaraguan government. For this reason, considering social and political criticism as an attack against the homeland, he has been sentenced to 26 years in prison and deprived of his Nicaraguan nationality. He was offered to leave the country in exile immediately before his sentencing. Since he refused to leave, the sentence was automatically produced, “wrote the also rector of the UCA of El Salvador between 1997 and 2010 in a column published by the Salvadoran newspaper Diario Co-Latino.
For the religious, the prosecution of Monsignor Álvarez by the Ortega regime is due to political reasons and that the pastoral action of the Bishop of Matagalpa is framed within the social doctrine of the Church.
“The circumstances of the event clearly show that a political trial has taken place and that both an opinion and the religious freedom of the prelate have been persecuted (…) The criticisms that Bishop Álvarez made of the Nicaraguan government were within the right to think and opinion differently, they were framed in the defense of the rights of the Nicaraguan people and corresponded to their own Catholic Christian thought that since Pope John XXIII has energetically insisted on the need to defend the rights of people from the Christian faith”, Tojeira expressed in the opinion article.
“He did nothing more than exercise his responsibility as a pastor”
Father José María Tojeira, who also served as Provincial of the Society of Jesus in Central America during the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989, recalled that Monsignor Rolando Álvarez has limited himself to fulfilling the pastoral mandate of defending the rights of poor when they are attacked from power.
«From the religious point of view, Mons. Álvarez did nothing more than exercise his responsibility as a pastor defending the rights of his people. The social doctrine of the Church systematically insists on the need to defend citizen participation, the democratic style of government, the rule of law. (…) The history of the Church is full of examples of resistance to power when it wanted to deny rights to the public manifestation of faith and works of faith,” stressed the Spanish religious, naturalized Salvadoran.
For the Jesuit, Monsignor Álvarez follows in the wake of Christian martyrs such as San Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador and Bishop Juan Gerardi of Guatemala, who also suffered persecution for telling the truth.
«Mons. Álvarez has continued with the best of the Christian tradition in defense of the poor, in denouncing injustices and in resisting the threats made against him. Like Romero, like Gerardi, like Rutilio who gave his life, and like many others who managed to survive different forms of persecution, Mons. Álvarez is on the way to the triumph of the truth over the idolatry of power and its eagerness to consider itself as absolute”, concludes the column by Father Tojeira.
