Father Mario de Jesús Guevara Calero. / Credit: Archdiocese of Managua

ACI Prensa Staff, Oct 14, 2025 / 16:05 pm (CNA).

Father Mario de Jesús Guevara Calero, 66, spiritual director of the La Purísima Archdiocesan Major Seminary in Nicaragua, died on Sunday, Oct. 12, according to the Archdiocese of Managua.

Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, archbishop of Managua, and the priests of the Nicaraguan capital “send their condolences to his family, the seminary community, and the parishioners he served for years in various parishes of our archdiocese,” a death notice from the archdiocese said.

On Dec. 5, 2018, while the priest was hearing confessions in the Managua cathedral, he was splashed with acid on his face and body by Russian citizen Elis Leonidovna Gonn, who was later arrested.

The priest required various surgeries and treatments and, according to the newspaper Confidencial, forgave the woman who attacked him. The incident occurred in the year the dictatorship ramped up the repression against the Catholic Church in the country.

In August 2019, the Nicaraguan dictatorship, led by President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, released Leonidovna Gonn, who was later expelled from the country.

“May God our Lord grant Father Mario Guevara to be already enjoying holy heaven. I give thanks to the Almighty for his life and his ministry,” researcher Martha Patricia Molina, author of the report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church, stated on X.

The latest edition of the report records more than 1,000 attacks by the dictatorship and that more than 16,500 processions and acts of piety have been prohibited by the Sandinista regime.

‘A man of prayer’

“It’s both interesting and a joy for me as a bishop to visit the parishes, and how beautiful it is when many of the faithful remember their priests,” Brenes said Oct. 13 in his homily for the funeral Mass he celebrated at the Immaculate Conception of Mary Parish in the Masaya pastoral area.

“I have been in recent weeks, today in three or four parishes in San Rafael del Sur, and we remember how, in the most difficult situations, Father Mario was there, serving those communities with total generosity. In difficult situations, but it’s beautiful [he did so] without complaining, but with dedication,” the cardinal continued.

Speaking of the illness from which the priest suffered at the end of his life, the cardinal commented that in “these last months, he was able to go through Calvary, his ailments like a street [paved with] bitterness, but when I had the opportunity to visit him in the hospital and sometimes at the seminary, at the end, he was smiling. And above all, I was struck by seeing near his bed, his Liturgy of the Hours, and the holy rosary in his hands.”

“I think these were moments of strength; a man of prayer, he truly knew how to maintain that communication with God and also with our mother, the Blessed Virgin,” he added.

The cardinal emphasized that Guevara “preached to us, not with grand words, but with his life, his simple life, but with tremendous power. And what was that power but the person of Jesus himself?”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.