Archbishop Obando y Bravo of Managua and the Nicaraguan hierarchy

are squaring up to the revolutionary Government in the country. Gary MacEoin reports on the heightened tension.
Defying the Sandinistas
IT WOULD SEEM to observers that Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Managua is playing a key role in the conspiracy to smear the Sandinistas as "Marxist-Leninist inspired" persecutors of religion. The objective is to promote discord inside Nicaragua and influence international opinion as part of a wider programme to denigrate in advance the elections scheduled ro Novermber 4.
Co-conspirators include the Voice of America and other propaganda services, as well as elements in the Roman Curia with access to Vatican Radio, the Vatican Press Office, and the Vatican daily Osservatore Romano.
Obando's role is now one of open defiance of the government. On July 5 for example, international news agencies reported and the Voice of America repeatedly rebroadcast for three days that Obando on September 9 would lead "the first anti-Sandinista protest march in five years."
Anxious to avoid a confrontation, the government appealed to the Secretary of the Papal Nunciature. When he said he was unable to change Obando's mind, the government publicly warned of "possible consequences" of a demonstration unlawful under the state of emergency (lifted on 19 July in preparation for the elections).
It made no attempt, however, to block the march in which Obando led 200 to 300 persons, including 15 to 20 priests and many foreign journalists.
A brief review of the ideoligical framework that led Obando to assume this role of defiance will help to put in perspective the consequence that came later.
In Nicaragua, as generally in Latin America, the government had, since Spanish times, a decisive voice in the selection of bishops, who automatically became "honorary" members of the oligarchy.
Obando was named under Somoza, as was Bishop Vega, now head of the Bishops' Conference. A broad range of attitudes toward the revolutionary process exists within the Conference, but Obando and Vega have successfully imposed their hard line.
As in neighbouring countries, the archbishop dominates the hierarchy. He has more priests, schools and institutions than the other seven dioceses combined.
Big business
During the 1970s, Obando
joined the sector of big business led by la Prensa newspaper that sought to oust Somoza while maintaining for their own benefit the exploitative system he had created. Even when committed to ousting Somoza, however, Obando avoided confrontation. While the armed resistance grew after 1971 until it finally triumphed in 1979, Obando and the other bishops always maintained an equivocal and respectful attitude. No prophet arose among them to denounce the tyranny, the torture, the oppression of the poor.
Obando each year opened the puppet parliament with a blessing. In 1978, as Somoza's aircraft were obliterating entire cities, he invoked the Spirit to shed light on its rubber-stamp function. Statements by the bishops repeatedly urged love and coexistence, while condemning the revolutionaries as sewing hatred and vengeanced.
Just six weeks before Somoza fled, the bishops finally hedged their bets. Revolutionary insurrection, they said, is morally justifiable when all other means to end a prolonged tyranny have failed.
But even then, Obando did not give up. Two days before the triumph, he was in Venezuela with members of Nicaragua's old political parties and big business. There he tried but failed to put together a coalition that would deny the Sandinistas the fruits of their victory — a project backed by Washington to retain the National Guard as the real power behind a socialdemocratic facade.
Since the triumph, Obando has been consistently hostile to
the Government of National Reconstruction. The single exception was a statement by the bishops in November 1979 praising the objectives of the revolution, a document deeply influenced by two visiting churchmen, Bishop Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca (Mexico) and Peruvian Liberation Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez.
The distortions surrounding the Pope's visit to Nicaragua are already well documented.
In December 1983, Bishop Schlaefer of Bluefields made international headlines as having led a contingent of Miskitos to refuge in Honduras from Sandinista persecution. The fact that Schlaefer just weeks earlier had participated, along with the Papal Nuncio and Moravian Bishop John Wilson in the public act declaring amnesty for all 307 Miskitos held on counterrevolutionary charges and for Miskitos wishing to return home from Honduras and Costa Rica did not restrain Obando.
"The spirit of violence is rising again," said the Bishops' Conference. "Like a new Moses," added Obando, "he led his people through the desert to freedom."
Fiction
The facts, as Schlaefer clarified them in friendly dialogue with the authorities on his return, were radically different. Schlaefer and his priests had gone to Francia Sirpi with no knowledge that the contras had planned a mass kidnapping.
The only way they could get out was to join the prisoners being taken to Honduras, because the contras had dynamited the bridges to Puerto Cabezas. Schluter had never played the "Moses" role invented by Obando. And he never told the press or anyone else that the Miskitos had been living in Nazi-style concentration camps.
Early this year, as election preparations moved forward, Bishop Vega as head of the Bishops' Conference set the tone. The war, he insisted, had to be seen in the East-West context in which the United States Administration had placed it.
This committed the bishops to a concept of neutrality that prevented them from ever denouncing the torture, mutilation and killing of noncombatants by the contras, or the United States intervention even when the mining of Nicaragua's ports by the CIA was openly acknowledged.
On Easter Sunday, the bishops demanded a dialogue with participation of "the Nicaraguans who had risen up in arms against the government," the contras led by and consisting in large part of Somoza's National Guard.
The government and the overwhelming majority of the people reacted with shocked outrage. The document contained no word of appreciation for the Revolution's social and educational work, no reference to the Contadora peace proposals, no mention of United States aggression. As many noted, it could have been written by Reagan's speech writers.
The Jesuits and Dominicans in Nicaragua, two of the Catholic church's most prestigious orders, in an unprecedented action pubicly rejected the analysis made by the bishops. Of Nicaragua's approximately 260 priests, 70 are Jesuits and 15 are Dominicans. Probably more than half the priests favour the revolutionary process, but many fear to take a public stand.
Obando has moved several priests from parishes in which they identified too openly with the Revolution. He has also asked heads of religious orders to give other assignments (in some cases, to send out of Nicaragua) to members, men and women, of whose work with the poor he disapproved.
Some superiors acquiesce, others refuse. The superior of one prominent nun asked Obando to put his objections in writing. He has not done so, and the nun continues her work of rehabilitation of Somozan Guards serving terms for killing or torturing civilians.
Revulsion
In early June, Obando in his Sunday sermon expressed his revulsion at the attempted assassination of Eden Pastora. But never has he condemned any of the contra attacks that have caused the deaths of hundreds of Nicaraguans.
Obando's open defiance of the government on July 9 had been preceded by charges of counter-revolutionary activity — including alleged trafficking in arms and explosives — against one of his top associates Fr Amado Pena.
Anxious to defuse the incident, the government privately shared the proofs with the Nuncio and Bishop Vega, head of the Bishops' Conference, requesting the Nuncio to keep Pena in the Nunciature until the issue was resolved. The government's response to the illegal march was to withdraw the residence permits of ten foreign priests, several of whom had marched. (From that time, the Voice of America no longer called in "an antiSandinista protest" but "a religious procession").
The Pope and even bishops sympathetic to the Revolution, like Cardinal Arns of Brazil, protested. We cannot accept the principle of differentiating among church workers on the basis of nationality, Arns said.
The government's conciliatory reply said the action did not reflect a policy; it was an isolated action to warn Obando he could not break the law with impunity. And in a further conciliatory gesture, the government named Jesuit Fernando Cardenal Minister of Education. Obando had long complained that education policies threatened religious values. Now the government was putting a distinguished priest in charge.
Obando was not appeased. An article in La Prensa cited one of his aides as saying that the Nicaraguan bishops, the four priests in government, and representatives of the government had met; and the
Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo priests had agreed to resign after the November 4 elections.
The story was a complete invention; a few days later, major European newspapers carried the story with the modification that the priests were about to resign any day.
Nicaragua's grassroots communities inspired by the theology of liberation are central to the popular support of the revolutionary process. The priests in government demonstrate the absurdity of charges that the regime is Marxist-Leninist.
Regardless of Obando's intentions, he is the perfect front man for the United States policy designed to persuade Latin Americans and the world that the project of a just society is Marxist-influenced.
Dr MacEoin is author of Revolution Next Door: Latin America in the 1970s, and other books on US-Latin American relations and on the Church in Latin America.