After dribs and drabs of criticism in responses to reporters over the past several months, Pope Francis finally came out with a statement about the full-blown assault on the Catholic Church from Nicaragua's Marxist dictator, Daniel Ortega. 

According to the New York Times:

Pope Francis used his New Year’s Day address to highlight concern over the worsening situation of the Roman Catholic Church in Nicaragua as a result of a protracted crackdown by the government of President Daniel Ortega, which has detained clerics, expelled missionaries, closed Catholic radio stations and limited religious celebrations.

Speaking to the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the traditional New Year’s Angelus prayer and blessing, Francis said he was “following with concern what is happening in Nicaragua, where bishops and priests have been deprived of their freedom.”

He expressed his “closeness in prayer to them, their families and the entire church in the country,” and called on all Catholics to “pray insistently” to find “a path of dialogue to overcome difficulties.”

“Let’s pray for Nicaragua today,” Francis said.

Vatican News reported on Monday that at least 14 priests, two seminarians and a bishop had been arrested in recent days in Nicaragua, and that the country’s top church leader, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, had expressed his closeness “to the families and communities who are without their priests at this time.”

Closeness? What closeness? The priests were right there, and now they aren't. They've been whisked away to unknown places, kidnapped by the state, and are now ensconced in some communist dungeon where they likely are being tortured and abused. The guy in the capital, or in Rome, offering 'closeness' is far away, just saying he feels their pain. 

It may be the right sentiment, but it's not good enough.

The pope's call for 'dialogue' is a doozy, too. Dialogue? It's like negotiating with terrorists. Dialogue has been going on for a long, long, time in night-haunted Nicaragua. It's the same call the pope makes to Venezuela's and Cuba's dictators who have destroyed their countries, thrown thousands into their own dungeons, driven many more to flee, and crushed all political freedoms. A lot of good that did -- these dirtbag dictators are more powerful than ever.

A powerful condemnation on the world stage, as many previous popes have done with other cruel regimes, would do a lot more. Let Ortega mock Pope Francis with a question about how many divisions he has -- so he can find out the hard way in this information age. 

What the pope fails to recognize in this weak call for Nicaragua's communist regime to play nice with the Church is that a full frontal assault on the Church has begun now. This is not a few objectionable things, this is a systematic bid to shut down the Church and chase it out of Nicaragua. That happened in Cuba, which is Ortega's Marxist model, and it will happen in Nicaragua. The Protestant churches, which are not insignificant on Nicaragua's east coast, are targets, too.

What does Daniel Ortega want in his arrests and kidnappings of these Nicaraguan priests? Well, to create terror, of course, to discourage any priest from speaking out about the corruption and poverty that Ortega's regime has brought.

He also is tidying up loose ends, having jailed seven political opponents who challenged him for the presidency. In going after priests, what he wants is an end to one of the last groups of people who can speak out against him and his oppressive, rotten, socialist regime.

He's long past the stage of being a social democrat, as he claimed years ago in his bid to persuade a new generation of voters to elect him, following his stint as a Sandinista revolutionary back in the 1980s, where by 1990, Nicaraguan voters threw him out.

There wasn't going to be any of that in Ortega's recrudescence that began in 2007, when he got elected again, and has extended to four terms, the last few of which have been universally condemned by the State Department and others as nakedly fraudulent.

What we have here is a full-blown Cuba model, Ortega being a lifelong ally of the communist regime there. The freedoms are gone. The opponents are jailed. The locals are fleeing. Now it's time to shut down the churches, leaving just the all-powerful state as their substitute.

Cuba has that horrid model, and Ortega, who is getting on in the years, having reached the age of 78, undoubtedly wants to duplicate that model before he goes, and with weak Joe Biden running the U.S. up in el norte, he knows the time is now.

Surely the pope can see what is going on, and must know that it's his Church that's being gored now ... and yet he doesn't.

Is it the pope's own latent Marxism that is making him reluctant to condemn Ortega, or think he can go head to head with Ortega and correct things with a little mano a mano dialogue?

Or is it the pope's de facto support for the source of Ortega's power, the global illegal migrant trade based on Joe Biden's attractive nuisance, the U.S. open border, which has become a cash cow for Ortega, who is organizing charter flights from all over the world to ship migrants north at a pretty penny to himself. Ortega, as I noted here, has an actual plan to destroy the United States by inflicting millions of illegal aliens from all over the world upon it, and the pope has loudly supported this project, criticizing the U.S. for not taking all comers as un-Christlike despite wreckage of Nicaragua that drives Nicaraguan's migrants out, and the wreckage of many places that are now shipping migrants through Nicaragua's abetment. The pope never has any criticism for Nicaragua on that front, or for those places that drive migrants to leave. He only has criticism of the U.S. for not taking in all comers and paying for them.

Could it be that? Is the pope choosing the migrant trade to Get Gringo, and leaving Nicaragua rot, even if it means Catholic clergy are being 'disappeared' and tortured in Nicaragua's filthy dungeons?

I don't want to think that's true, but it's what comes to mind when one sees a weak response like this from the Vatican. The pope should be holding this hellhole regime up to shame and demanding the release of the kidnapped priests, citing the Argentine 'dirty war' or better still, the Castro regime as the disaster in the making. It shouldn't place taking the U.S. down a peg over defending Nicaragua. The pope, of course, has spent a lot of time taking down critics of his own from the U.S., as well as wasting time on blessings for gays and other non-doctrinal changes that have the appearance of changes. While he's been busy doing that, Nicaragua (and Nigeria) have been under full-blown attack.

What happens to a nation that doesn't allow any churches? It becomes like Cuba, a desperately miserable place brimming with people with no social capital, no moral compass, and no future. It creates ruin, and that's what we are seeing now in Nicaragua. The pope's job here is not to make useless calls for 'dialogue' but at this point to state his outrage at what is outrageous.

Image:  Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan) | Government Website Open Information Announcement, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED