From exile in the United States, Nicaraguan lawyer Martha Patricia Molina has once again lifted the veil on what she describes as the slow suffocation of the Catholic Church in her homeland. Her seventh report, released under the title «Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?», spans 435 pages of documentation, testimony, and numbers that sketch a portrait of religious life under siege.

The statistics are stark. Since April 2018, when President Daniel Ortega’s government turned its fury against Catholic leaders who had stood with peaceful demonstrators, the Church has endured 1,010 aggressions and seen more than 16,500 processions banned. Yet behind these numbers lies a more chilling trend: the erosion of the Church’s ability to speak at all.

If 2025 appears calmer in raw figures—just 32 documented attacks so far—it is not because persecution has subsided, Molina argues, but because the Church has been brought to heel. “Clerics cannot denounce abuses under any circumstance,” she explains. “The threats are clear: whoever speaks is imprisoned or expelled.” Priests are closely monitored, their cell phones checked by police. Even parishioners have grown fearful, watched over by local councils, state agents, and an army of paramilitaries sworn in earlier this year.

This climate of intimidation is reinforced by confiscations, frozen bank accounts, punitive taxation, and relentless propaganda. Schools and congregations are coerced into carrying out state-mandated activities. Religious properties, from parish houses to retreat centers, have been seized. Most recently, the government forbade Catholic media from publishing a letter of the Pope, a symbolic act that underscores how even the voice of Rome is now unwelcome in Nicaragua.

Among the most alarming new cases is the detention and disappearance of Father Pedro Abelardo Méndez Pérez in Granada, his fate still unknown. Even Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, the Archbishop of Managua, lives under constant police surveillance. Meanwhile, Rosario Murillo, Nicaragua’s vice president and Ortega’s wife, has used state-run media to unleash open hostility against Church leaders.