Nicaragua’s communist regime banned the Catholic dioceses of León and Chinandega from carrying out door-to-door evangelization, newspaper La Prensa reported on Thursday.
The situation was denounced by Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer and activist who for years has documented the numerous acts of Christian persecution committed by dictatorial “co-presidential” couple Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
“Dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have banned pastoral missions in the Diocese of León, where the Ecclesiological Year is being celebrated in 2026. On January 24, 2026, the missions were going to go door to door to preach the Gospel, the word of God, but permission was denied,” Molina told La Prensa.
Molina detailed to the newspaper that the first lay people who evangelized successfully managed to visit local homes last Saturday before the activity was strictly prohibited by the Ortega regime, ordering the clergy of both Dioceses to “do your business indoors.”
“The police banned the missions that were scheduled for next weekend and urged everyone to stay in their parishes without going out to preach the word, which makes the activity a failure because the spirit of it was to bring the Word of God from house to house,” Molina denounced through social media.
La Prensa explained that the Bishop of León, Sácrates René Sándigo had decreed that 2026 would be celebrated as the Ecclesiological Year to mark the 500th anniversary of the Diocese. The planned activities called for the celebration of the Eucharist and then going door to door preaching the Gospel in addition to pilgrimages and pastoral missions.
“The spirit of this activity is that the Gospel should go from house to house, not remain locked up in the church. There are people who do not go to church, so we go out and knock on doors. Repression is increasing and is increasingly directed at these pastoral activities,” Molina warned.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days Doña Rosario [Murillo] wakes up paranoid and orders all the parishes to be closed,” she continued.
The activist also denounced that, while the clergy and faithful are repressed and evangelization is prohibited, the Ortega regime allows activities unrelated to worship. Molina denounced to La Prensa that, this week, the communist regime ordered church workers to open the doors of the temple of Our Lady of Mercy in León and “they stayed there until dawn celebrating and drinking liquor.”
“They allow that, but they don’t allow the Church to go out and preach the Gospel,” Molina stressed.
The prohibition marks the latest act of religious persecution against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church committed by the Ortega and Murillo regime. For years, the communist husband-and-wife dictatorial couple have waged a fierce campaign against Christianity in Nicaragua as “punishment” for the Nicaraguan Catholic Church’s support of the 2018 wave of anti-communist peaceful protests in Nicaragua. La Prensa detailed on Thursday that, according to the World Christian Database, 75.3 percent of Nicaraguans identify as Catholic.
Molina is currently leading an investigation of the persecution of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church in Nicaragua under the communist Ortega regime titled “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church.” A copy of the Seventh edition of the investigation’s yearly report was presented by Muriel Sáenz to Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on October 2025.
Last week, speaking at a hearing at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Molina and Nicaraguan activist Muriel Sáenz denounced a staggering 19,836 documented acts of religious persecution against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church committed by the Ortega regime since April 2018. The two activists detailed to USCIRF that more than 300 priests have been forced into exile, expelled, or banned from entering Nicaragua in the past years. They stressed that Christians in Nicaraguan territory are persecuted, harassed, and spied on by Ortega’s police and paramilitaries who attend churches to photograph the faithful.
“Nicaraguans live in fear because of the dictatorship’s ruthlessness,” Molina reportedly said at the hearing, and detailed that some of the dioceses in Nicaragua only have about 30 percent of its priests remaining after many of its clergymen have been banished.
Molina and Sáenz also recounted the December 2025 restrictions imposed by the Ortega regime that prohibit travelers from bringing Bibles into the country.
Similarly, ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language division of the Catholic News Agency, reported this week that the Christian human rights organization Open Doors denounced in its yearly Christian persecution and discrimination report that Christians in Nicaragua “are increasingly being silenced” under the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.
Open Doors ranked Nicaragua No. 32 in its list of top 50 countries in the world where Christians suffer the most persecution because of their faith — up from 61 in 2022, the year when Ortega dramatically ramped up its persecution against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church.
“Believers who raise their voices against the government over issues including human rights violations have faced surveillance, intimidation and imprisonment. Some even face exile and loss of citizenship. Meanwhile, churches and other Christian institutions (e.g. schools and charities) are deemed a threat to the regime,” Open Doors wrote in its report.
“They have had assets seized, activities disrupted and banned, and buildings vandalized. Rather than be seen as a valuable part of the country’s fabric, many Christians are viewed as ‘destabilizing agents,'” the report continued.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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