Nicaragua

Excerpts From The Nicaraguan Bishops Communiqué Of June 1, 1981

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...Dear faithful, we do not wish to prolong this pastoral communiqué further. Therefore we conclude by saying that, after having made known to the Holy See everything concerning this matter, and having received the total backing and authorization to proceed in accordance with our serious responsibilities as pastors:

1. We reaffirm totally what we said in our Pastoral Communiqué of May 13, 1980.

2. We declare that if the priests who are occupying political office and exercising partisan functions do not leave those responsibilities as soon as possible in order to incorporate themselves totally in their specific priestly ministry, we will consider them in an attitude of open rebellion and formal disobedience to legitimate ecclesiastical authority and subject to the sanctions provided by the laws of the Church.

3. Taking this opportunity, and apologizing for putting it a little out of context, we want to add a clarification requested by many of our faithful: The Institute Histórico, the Centro Valdivieso, and CEPA are not official organizations of the Church and have neither the approval nor the recommendation of the Episcopal Conference.

We want to end in the same way that we ended the document of last year that was referred to:

We energetically reject beforehand any eventual political or partisan use which might try to be made of the Pastoral Communiqué, a recourse which is the easiest and very easy. The present communiqué has as its object the strengthening of the unity and be efficacy in ecclesiastical service.

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