Pilgrims take the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pondering deeply personal questions, seeking insight through the journey or simply wanting time to reflect and encounter God. With Sister Katherine, they are able to talk through their experience and its unique lessons.

Those Jesuits who remain, he said, now face the “fundamental concern” of expulsion or detention if relations between the Society of Jesus and the government of former Sandinista comandante President Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, grow any worse.

Pope Francis commented that the situation in the Catholic Church in the United States is “not easy,” where “there is a very strong reactionary attitude” that “is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally.”

The church, while not taking sides in the political contests, went all in on the referendums to stop drilling on oil Block 43 inside the Yasuní and to end mining in the Chocó Andino, a highland biosphere near the capital.

The latest moves by the Ortega regime came close to a direct expulsion of the Jesuits without actually stepping over that line, according to an expert on Latin American revolutions.

Nicaraguan officials ratcheted up a harassment campaign targeting Jesuits in Managua over the weekend.