Father Bellusci with the Dominican nuns of Managua, who he calls “the salt and light of Nicaragua.” (Submitted photo)
In Managua, Nicaragua, a community of cloistered Dominican nuns offer themselves to Christ. Attached to their monastery is a chapel where the Dominican Fathers celebrate Mass, providing the opportunity for pastoral outreach to the surrounding neighbourhood, with an adjacent building for classes for catechetical ministry. The nuns are cloistered, with a papal enclosure so that even during Masses they remain “enclosed” within their monastic walls.
I met the Dominican nuns several years ago during a visit to Nicaragua and we discussed the possibility of having a series of classes. We decided on a course on the Theology of the Body, teachings of St. John Paul II. The challenge would be to teach the material in Spanish.
I must say that I find cloistered nuns quite extraordinary in their vocation and radical response to God’s call. When I was giving a retreat to postulants in Rweza, Burundi, the nuns lived in a remote region of the country and endured a civil war at great risk to their lives. Like any vocation, cloistered life is a call that needs to be discerned as to whether it is God’s will. This is true for any vocation – father, mother, teacher, religious, deacon, priest …
The experience with cloistered communities is how much one receives gratuitously, and in turn, there is a gratuitous desire to give.
The nuns in Nicaragua were found by the Mexican Federation of Dominican Nuns of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The nuns set out to establish the Dominican monastery in León, Nicaragua, and arrived in the diocese June 3, 1986. The founding nuns came from five different Mexican monasteries: Tampico, Puebla, Patzcuaro, Xilitla, and Morelia – eight sisters in all. This move from one country to another, leaving one’s culture, farther from one’s family and friends, is a sign of remarkable courage, and a testimony of faith. They can only be described as outstanding women receptive to God’s grace – putting their trust in God, abandoning themselves to Divine Providence.
Due to a hurricane that struck León in 1998 and hit the Dominican monastery, the nuns had to leave the Diocese of Leon, moving to the Diocese of Managua.
Four of the original foundresses remain in the Nicaraguan community, which is made up of five Mexicans, one Costa Rican, two Salvadorians, and two Nicaraguans. The composition of the community is clearly from Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic cultures where religious life and cloistered communities as demanding as these vocations are still belong to the religious culture of Latin America.
In the case of Managua, Saint Dominic is the patron saint, and so, Aug. 8, his feast day, is a major event. But Nicaragua’s biggest celebration is La Purissima, “the most pure One,” the novena leading up to the Immaculate Conception, Dec. 8,h where streets and houses contains altars in honour of the Immaculate Conception, besides food and drink for visitors.
Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America, with Honduras on the northern border and Costa Rica to the south, the Pacific Ocean on the west, and the Caribbean Sea to the east, opening to the Atlantic ocean. Unlike its neighbours, Panama and Costa Rica, which have had greater political stability and economic prosperity, Nicaragua has been victim of both natural disasters and corrupt dictators (from the left and right, the Somozas and Sandinistas).
The two major Nicaraguan cities were nearly destroyed due to natural catastrophes. The first capital, what is now León Viejo, was wiped out by the eruption of the volcanic mountain Monotombo in 1610. Managua, which became the capital city in 1852, emerged as Central America’s booming city but was struck by a major earthquake in 1972. The old cathedral of Managua built between 1928-1938 and designed by Belgian architects survived, but due to the weakened walls and seismic conditions beneath the church, a new cathedral was built in Managua.
On the political spectrum Nicaragua has swung between right-wing and left-wing dictators, and when Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1983 he rebuked the left-leaning clergy associated with the Sandinista regime. Violeta Chamorra, Nicaragua’s first female president, was elected in 1990 by anti-Sandinistas (both political left and right). In 2006, undermined by Daniel Ortega’s Sandinistas, Ortega was elected as president. Since April 2018 popular revolts have demanded the resignation of Ortega, his vice-president wife, and the Sandinista government. Street demonstrations and student protests have led to hundreds of wounded civilians and deaths, with police and military shooting demonstrators in the streets.
Unlike the spiritual drought in many parts of Europe where Christianity is nothing more than the relics of monarchs serving nationalist interests, the Nicaraguans are a deeply religious people like their Latin American counterparts. However, poverty, misunderstood ecumenism, and the limited resources of the Catholic hierarchy have led to a significant drop in the Catholic population. Catholicism has plummeted to somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent, amongst the lowest in Latin America. Christian cults and sects and non-Christian Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses have sowed seeds of confusion, doubt, and even hatred, turning thousands of Nicaraguans away from the church of their baptism.
Yet, the cloistered nuns who have radically chosen to follow the Gospel of Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life, relying on supernatural grace, bring the light of Christ to the faithful. This monastery of nuns is the salt and light of Nicaragua.