Pope Francis, decades late, better than never.

Strib publishing an AP feed online:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has reinstated a Nicaraguan priest suspended by the Vatican in the 1980s for participating in Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

The 81-year-old Rev. Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, Nicaragua's foreign minister from 1979-1990, recently wrote to Francis asking to be allowed to celebrate Mass again before he died. [...]

The Vatican suspended D'Escoto and three other dissident priests in 1985 for defying a church ban on clergy holding government jobs. The sanction was also a reflection of St. John Paul II's broader crackdown on liberation theology in Latin America.

The Sandinistas, who supported the "popular church" of liberation theology, overthrew the pro-American regime of Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Francis, who was a young Jesuit provincial in Argentina at the time, shared John Paul's opposition to the perceived Marxist excesses of liberation theology. But as pope, he has also called for a more merciful church and has indicated that another symbol of liberation theology, slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, will soon be beatified.