The Catholic priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal was a moral figure of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, FLSN, the left-wing political party and guerrilla movement that ended the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979.
In 1990 Ernesto Cardenal resigned from the FLSN. Father Cardenal, who died in 2020, charged Daniel Ortega — the current dictatorial president — with betraying the revolution's ideals. ‘Those who now govern calling themselves Sandinistas are not,’ Cardenal declared.
Unlike Cuba, the Nicaraguan revolution was never secular. Liberation Theology highly influenced the Nicaraguan Revolution. Many priests joined the guerrilla fight and the post-revolution period — this was the case of Miguel D'Escoto, Edgard Parrales, Uriel Molina, Gaspar García Laviana and Fernando Cardenal, brother of Ernesto Cardenal
‘Between Christianity and revolution, there is no contradiction,’ was a popular 1980s belief. And yet, the Sandinistas and Nicaragua’s Catholic Church have had, to say the least, a patchy historical relationship.
The ideological contradictions between the Sandinistas and the Catholic church are fundamental to this fickle historical relationship. In the 1980s, the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, led by archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, adopted the US view of the Sandinistas as a communist expansion threat.
'In less than four years, the Catholic Church has suffered 190 attacks and desecrations, including a fire in the Cathedral of Managua.'
In 1985, Pope John Paul II named Obando y Bravo as Cardenal, who became the standard bearer of the fight against the Sandinistas and exponents of the Liberation Theology. In the 1996 elections, Obando y Bravo called to vote against Ortega. Catholic leaders have often backed the country's conservative elite. Defeated and infuriated, Ortega began a systematic campaign against the Catholic hierarchy.
After three failed attempts, Ortega returned to power in 2007. In another turn of events, Ortega’s victory was due to the support received from Cardenal Obando y Bravo. In the campaign, Ortega made an offer the conservative Catholic hierarchy couldn’t refuse. He championed an unforgiving law that placed Nicaragua among a tiny group of nations that criminalise abortion under any circumstances.
To ingratiate himself even further with the Catholic Church, Ortega renewed the wedding vows with Rosario Murillo, now his vice-president, in a mass officiated by Cardenal Miguel Obando y Bravo. Between 2007 to 2018, Ortega disbursed nearly US$20 million in donations to Catholic and Evangelical churches. According to an investigation by Connectas, an independent digital media, of the almost 20 million, 44.21 per cent was directed to the Catholic church and 12.50 per cent