Contemporary history: key events and periods

POPE JOHN PAUL II'S 1983 VISIT TO NICARAGUA

Pope's 1983 Visit to Nicaragua

Pope John Paul II's 1983 Visit to Nicaragua

Katharine Hoyt (1983) wrote a personal letter to her family concerning the 1983 visit of Pope John Paul II to Managua, Nicaragua. From the very beginning her feelings about the visit were made clear when she declared that she would rather forget the visit ever happened. From her perspective, her fellow citizens, at least the Sandinistas, were hoping to get some recognition for the sweat, blood, and tears shed in their revolution; a revolution based on the goal of establishing a more egalitarian society. What she feels the country got instead was a blow to the gut that meant more blood in the streets.

The Sandinistas came to power in 1979 after overthrowing the Anastasio Somoza Debayle dictatorship, which had ruled for over 50 years (Ellman, 1983). The Catholic Church had openly supported the overthrow of the Debayle Regime, but the Church cringed when it saw what appeared to be a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist regime taking hold in Nicaragua. From the perspective of Sandinista leaders, the Church had been actively attempting to undermine its legitimacy. Both claims seem to have some legitimacy.

Hoyt (1983) mentioned the "Popularum Progressio" encyclical given by Pope Paul VI in 1967 that justified insurrection under certain conditions and the support given to liberation theology at the 1968 Latin American Bishops Conference in Columbia, but was shocked when the Pope's speech upon his arrival in Managua in 1983 held not one word of support for the revolutionaries in Nicaragua. Instead, the Pope preached upon his arrival at the airport against subjecting school children of Catholic parents to an atheist ideology. Nicaraguan Catholics were likewise disappointed when the Pope's sermon admonished Nicaraguans to abandon "unacceptable ideological commitments."