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Eighty-year-old Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata has now been missing nineteen days after Nicaraguan state agents seized him from his residence. The Sandinista regime, heir to the same revolutionary spirit that once devoured its own bishops and priests, has added another name to its ledger of the disappeared.
This abduction follows a calculated pattern of raids, expulsions, and asset seizures against the Nicaraguan episcopate, aimed at breaking the Church's independence and reducing its clergy to compliant functionaries of the state.
The motive is not hidden. The regime seeks to extinguish every institution that refuses to bow before its total claim upon the conscience and the household, continuing the work begun when the same movement first turned its guns on Catholic processions in the 1980s.
From the beginning the Church has known such powers. When Diocletian ordered the arrest of bishops across the empire, he did not claim to oppose religion; he demanded that the altars of the state alone receive sacrifice.
The same demand echoes today. The City of Man cannot tolerate a visible body that declares another King and another law, for such a body exposes the regime's claim to be false and its authority as usurpation.
Scripture records the fate of those who touch the Lord's anointed: the hand that seizes the shepherd invites the rod of the Shepherd's Lord. History confirms the pattern; every throne that sought to swallow the Church eventually cracked beneath the weight of its own crimes.
The faithful remnant in Nicaragua therefore stands not alone but within the unbroken line of confessors who refused the state's liturgy. Their duty is to keep the faith, to shelter the remaining clergy, and to bear public witness that the disappearance of a bishop is an act of war against Christ Himself.
Those who remain free in other lands must now supply the persecuted Church with every material and spiritual aid that can still cross the border, for the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church and the measure of every nation's judgment.
