By Robert W. Shaffern

But first, a note from Robert Royal: So today is the last day of our 2023 end-of-year fundraising. It's also, fittingly, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, one of the great days for the redemption of all humanity. We know times are hard for many these days. All the more reason that those of us with means bear up our sisters and brothers who can't help materially. The Catholic Thing and all our publications (courses excepted, which take much prep and workup) are free and we hope always will be. And it's your generosity that makes that free distribution what it is to tens of thousands of fellow readers every day. Let's make this day even more special with a final affirmation of this Catholic Thing. Click the Donation button. Become part of the effort.

Now for Professor Shaffern's column...

Since August, the Sandinista government has declared war on the Catholic Church in the small Central American country of Nicaragua. Bishops and priests have been either imprisoned or exiled. The government has frozen the bank and retirement accounts of priests. The University of Central America (UCA), a Catholic university, has been confiscated and accused of serving as a training center for terrorists.

The Sandinista regime has ignored the condemnation of Church officials and governments around the world. The government seems determined to eradicate the Roman Catholic Church. Sandinista President Daniel Ortega seeks to create a Nicaragua in which only the state's views will be allowed to exist.

To their eternal shame, prominent figures in the Nicaraguan Catholic Church contributed in no small measure to this catastrophe, the seeds of which have been germinating since the conclusion in 1979 of the bloody and brutal civil war that had plagued that country for a decade. In that year, the Bolshevik Sandinistas drove the last of the Somoza dynasty of dictators from the country. Many Catholic clergy supported the Sandinistas, especially members of the Jesuit order.

Just before World War II, Jesuits increased their presence in central America. In 1937, the Society of Jesus created the vice-province of Central America, thus separating that region administratively from Mexico. Father Pedro Arrupe Gondra, Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983, elevated the vice-province to a full province in 1976, while the civil war in Nicaragua was raging.

Eager to alleviate the suffering of the poverty-stricken masses in that region, and concerned to keep out a Communist regime, the Jesuits who worked in Central America during the 1940s and 1950s fostered the emergence of Christian Democratic parties and movements similar to those organized in Europe after World War II. A major contribution to this mission came in 1960, when Jesuits founded the University of Central America. Ironically, the Somoza family donated the land on which Nicaragua's only private university was to be built.

During the 1960s and 1970s, however, central American Jesuits increasingly allied themselves with the far Left, in imitation of eighteenth-century figures such as the Abbé Sieyès and Talleyrand. They heralded and aided the victory of the Communist Sandinistas. Indeed, several Jesuits had been important Sandinistas themselves: Fernando Cardenal, his brother Ernesto Cardenal, Miguel D'Escoto, and Edgar Parrales, all of whom were liberation theologians who supported violent revolution against the Somoza regime.

After 1979, all of them held government positions. Fernando Cardenal served as the Minister of Education (which, of course, spouted government propaganda). Ernesto Cardenal was Minister of Culture (also propagandistic), and D'Escoto became Foreign Minister.

For his part, Arrupe called for a kind of Nicaraguan ralliement, akin to Pope Leo XIII's plea to French Catholics in 1892 not to shun or undermine the government of the anticlerical French Third Republic. He asked Jesuits and others to offer the Sandinistas their "generous support....