Bianca Jagger just issued a thundering warning about Nicaragua’s human rights abuses: “Just like the Castro Regime did in Cuba during the 1960s,” she wrote in the U.K.’s Independent, Nicaragua has put “harsh restrictions on religious freedom, practices, and church processions. Catholic education has been forbidden.” She even compares the country’s current purge of the Catholic Church “to Joseph Stalin’s purge of religious institutions in the Soviet Union.” Her appeal comes just a few weeks after Nicaragua’s human rights hero Bishop Rolando José Álvarez was released from jail and repatriated to Rome thanks in part to the intervention of Pope Francis. He is one of hundreds of Nicaraguan priests imprisoned and exiled in the last year. Nicaragua is following the path laid out by totalitarians in Russia, Cuba, China, and elsewhere: Shut down the Church, because otherwise the forgotten and the persecuted will have a voice. Protestant pastors are facing persecution as well. Why do so few Americans pay attention to the horrors of Marxist-leaning regimes? For me, an even more troubling question is: Why do Catholics know so little about the martyrs and victims of the brutalities of communism? One reason, not so obvious, may be that the Catholic Church traditionally has categorized martyrs under their national identity—for example, “Martyrs of China.” This categorization, while logical, tends to bury what these martyrs have in common: These men and women are heroes of faith who stood up before godless, murderous, totalitarian ideologies that spread across the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In earlier eras, martyrs mostly suffered at the hands of their local governing authorities; now it is...
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