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Pope Reinstates 'Sandinista' Priest
By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent
VATICAN CITY (Worthy News)-- Pope Francis has reinstated a priest suspended by the Vatican in the 1980s for participating in Nicaragua's Sandinista government, according to Yahoo News.
The 81-year-old Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann -- who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister from 1979-1990 -- had petitioned the pope to once again celebrate Mass before he died. The Vatican revealed Monday that Francis had agreed to the request and asked Brockmann's religious superior to help reinstate him back into the ministry.
The Vatican had suspended Brockmann and three other dissident priests in 1985 for defying a church ban on Catholic clergy holding government positions. The ban was part of Pope John Paul II's crackdown on widespread liberation theology in Latin America.
As a Jesuit provincial in Argentina, Francis had agreed with John Paul's opposition to Marxist liberation theology, but now as pope, he has adopted a softer approach to church discipline.
Brockmann was ordained a priest in 1961, but he remained an inactive member of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers during his 29-year suspension. On Friday the order announced Francis' decree lifting his suspension, thereby allowing Brockmann to resume his priestly duties.
Were there any preconditions to Brockmann's re-entry into the priesthood, e.g., that he publicly admit wrongdoing for deliberately disobeying his religious superiors to follow a faux theology that used Catholicism as a screen for violent revolution?
Did Brockmann ever ask for forgiveness, or just permission to have his cake and eat it too before he died.