By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On May 17, 1981, Fr. Ted Hesburgh invited President Ronald Reagan to deliver the Commencement Address at Notre Dame University, my alma mater.
“The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization,” the President told us. “The West won’t contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. It won’t bother to dismiss or denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Outside, thousands of demonstrators disagreed. They had been permitted to camp out on campus for days.
How could a Catholic school welcome a president who opposed the Sandinista Communists, they asked? Why, Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista Junta includes two Catholic priests! And a liberated Nicaragua is becoming truly “Catholic,” with a Communist “Christ the Liberator” leading the way!
I spoke with several of those demonstrators on campus that day. They were part of a nationwide agitprop campaign orchestrated by the international Left.
The goal? To derail Reagan’s efforts to oppose the Communist revolutionaries that were terrorizing several countries in Central and South America at the time. The seething anger I saw in the crowd that day bore an eerie resemblance to that of the antiwar demonstrators that had filled streets across the country a decade and more before.
Today we know that Reagan’s predictions were prophetic. But they weren’t a surprise.
In 1978, Notre Dame grad Richard Allen asked Reagan to give him fifteen minutes. Dick wanted to run for Congress — from New Jersey, if I recall correctly.
Reagan welcomed him warmly. As Dick was about to leave, Reagan asked him, “Do you want to know my policy regarding the Soviet Union?”
Dick was an expert on foreign affairs, but he had a plane to catch.
“Sure, Governor,” he said.
“We win.”
Dick canceled his flight and went to work full-time to get Ronald Reagan elected president. And he became Reagan’s first National Security Advisor.
And throughout the 1980s, working back-door through Catholic Lt. General Vernon Walters as his secret emissary to Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan succeeded: The wall came down in 1989.
…And Notre Dame Marches On As Well
It’s worth noting that, 28 commencements after Fr. Hesburgh welcomed Ronald Reagan, Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins, CSC, welcomed Barack Obama.
But this time around, the ground rules had changed. Fr. Jenkins engineered a back-door entrance for Obama’s entourage, allowing the pro-abortion “Master of Empathy” to avoid the thousands of pro-life demonstrators that mobbed the public entrances to the campus.
On the campus itself, pro-life demonstrators were barred. When 88 of them, including an elderly priest in a wheelchair, quietly marched onto the campus, they were arrested by campus police.
A bitter Jenkins fumed: he wanted to punish those upstart interlopers for tarnishing his golden moment, his day of basking in the sunshine of the “Holy O.”
However, represented by The Thomas More Society, the “ND 88” sued.
Fr. Jenkins finally relented when he settled their lawsuit by asking the local prosecutor to withdraw the charges. Meanwhile, in order to demonstrate his own pro-life bona fides, he agreed to attend the 2010 March for Life in Washington the following January.
Revolution Is A One-Way Street
While the “ND 88” won an important victory, those thousands of demonstrators who protested Ronald Reagan’s address finally got theirs too.
Daniel Ortega, who, with the indispensable assistance of Jimmy Carter, led the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, came into permanent power years later and began establishing a brutal Marxist dictatorship. He has been consolidating his power ever since, and, like every Communist, his prime mandate is the destruction of the Catholic Church.
In the early 1990s, Miguel Cardinal Obando y Bravo, the heroic archbishop of Managua, told me, “I have to sleep in a different bed every night because they’re trying to kill me.”
Central American University — UCA, as it is known — was founded in 1960 by the Society of Jesus. At the time, it was the only private university in Central America, and its reputation as a serious institution grew (that characteristic was less than universal among the public universities in the region at the time).
Last week, a court in Managua seized all the assets of UCA, claiming that the school was a “center for terrorism organized by criminal groups.” Of course, the court is hardly independent of the Marxist regime. And any institution not working to “advance the revolution,” in Lenin’s words, can quickly fall into the “terrorist” category at the whim of the ruling party.
Edgar Beltran described the travails of the Nicaraguan Church last March:
“‘Let them be free, I will serve their sentences,’ said Bishop Rolando Alvarez when offered the chance to be exiled to the U.S. alongside 222 other Nicaraguan political prisoners.
“A day later, he was sentenced to 26 years in prison.”
Beltran’s account is confirmed by our friends in Nicaragua who tell of armored trucks full of young Sandinistas with AK-47’s rolling through neighborhoods day and night, the ubiquity of spies and informants, and, especially, the constant war against not only the Church, but Nicaragua’s Catholic faithful.
“On February 9, three priests, two seminarians, a deacon, and a layman were sentenced to 10 years in prison,” he writes. “Their alleged crimes? Conspiracy against the Nicaraguan state and propagation of fake news. In reality, all they did was accompany [Bishop Alvarez] while he was trapped in his residency. The Nicaraguan dictatorship did not allow him to leave it to celebrate a Mass in protest against the human rights abuses in the country on August 4, 2022.
“Fifteen days later, all but Alvarez were taken to El Chipote, a prison known for being a torture center for political prisoners. Alvarez was placed under house arrest.”
“Just last year,” he continues, “the papal nuncio was kicked out of the country, as were the Missionaries of Charity, the religious congregation founded by Mother Teresa. Eight priests, three laypeople who worked for a diocese, two seminarians, and a deacon have been imprisoned.
“Bishop Rolando Alvarez of the small, rural diocese of Matagalpa, has become the face of the persecution in the country — and an icon of resistance against Ortega. His pictures kneeling with the Blessed Sacrament in hand, while surrounded by police officers in front of the curial building, have become the symbol of the Catholic struggle in Nicaragua,” Beltran wrote.
Just days after confiscating the university, Ortega expelled the Jesuits from their community house, leaving all of their personal possessions behind.
Also last week, Aviapro.net reported that Ortega had signed an agreement allowing Russia to build military bases in Nicaragua and install cruise missiles on them.
You Reap What You Sow
In the 1980s, several Latin American prelates alerted Members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, through this writer, that their brother bishops in the United States were supporting not only the Sandinistas, but Marxist revolutionaries throughout the region. Unfortunately, when Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s USCCB and Fr. Blase Cupich, the American secretary at the Apostolic Nunciature, found out about their complaints, they ignored them.
Well, we now know that Liberation Theology had spread far beyond Latin America by the 1980s, and the American hierarchy was already in its thrall. Of course, they called their version “Social Justice,” and they still do. But behind the new label, the old message: Christ came not to save our souls, but to liberate the poor — not from sin, but from their worldly oppressors.
Including, apparently, us.
So today Ortega’s version of “Social Justice” has destroyed Managua’s Jesuit university.
Will our shepherds condemn this outrage?
Of course, they will — and most of them will mean it. But will they ever admit that they might share some of the blame?
We shall see. But in the meantime, we remember:
Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have very bad consequences.
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