Read Aloud · Premium
Listen to any dispatch in the Grok vocal voices — a benefit of membership.
The UN high commissioner for human rights demands that Daniel Ortega disclose the whereabouts of Bishop Abelardo Mata, an eighty-year-old shepherd taken from his flock. Ortega's agents have already shuttered Catholic institutions and driven priests into exile or worse, acting now as the latest instrument of the City of Man against the City of God.
This abduction fits the ancient pattern in which rulers who fear the independence of the Church resort to disappearance and terror. The regime's motive is not mere political control but the elimination of any authority that refuses to bow to the state's total claim upon the conscience and the household.
Augustine warned that the earthly city seeks to make itself the sole object of loyalty, devouring every rival allegiance. The Nicaraguan dictatorship repeats the crime of every regime that has treated the Church as an enemy rather than the guardian of eternal order.
The creeds and councils of the undivided Church established that no civil power holds jurisdiction over the preaching of the Gospel or the shepherding of souls. Ortega's actions violate that settled distinction between the two cities and revive the persecution the martyrs faced under pagan and later revolutionary states.
From the days when Diocletian hunted bishops to the present hour, the faithful have understood that such seizures signal a deeper war against the sovereignty of God in His Church. The UN's tepid protest changes nothing; it merely registers the fact that the regime still fears exposure.
The faithful remnant must therefore refuse every accommodation with regimes that traffic in the abduction of bishops. They must name the Ortega dictatorship for what it is: a direct assault upon the visible order Christ established for the defense of His people.
Households and parishes must now strengthen ties of mutual aid with the persecuted Church in Nicaragua, supplying the material and spiritual resources the regime seeks to sever. Prayer without action leaves the shepherd in the hands of wolves.
The blood of such confessors continues to mark the boundary between the two cities. Those who remain silent when bishops disappear have already chosen their allegiance.
