The Clergy’s Hate Campaign

However, the Catholic clergy immediately began scheming to discredit the Witnesses. Backed by the concordat that Trujillo had signed with the Vatican, the clergy intensified their efforts to influence the government to eliminate the Witnesses. Catholic priest Oscar Robles Toledano sent a memorandum to the State Secretary of the Interior, Virgilio Álvarez Pina, asking the government to support him in his effort to “awaken the conscience of the Dominican people to the extreme dangers posed by the sect ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’.”

Toledano explained that his primary objective was “to make ineffective the proselytizing campaign of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Toledano’s memorandum also recommended that our publications not be allowed into the country, “especially the book ‘The Truth Shall Make You Free’ and the Watchtower magazine.”

The chain reaction was set off the day a Jesuit priest named Mariano Vásquez Sanz denounced the sect over the Trujillo-owned radio network, La Voz Dominicana [the Dominican Voice], as servants of Communism and labeled its adherents as ‘a perverse, astute, criminal, traitorous enemy.’ Thereupon a pastoral letter signed by Archbishops Ricardo Pittini and Octavio Antonio Beras invited the priesthood to protect their parishioners from this ‘terrible heresy.’”

Brother Aybar was fined and sentenced to three months in prison. He continued: “During our time of confinement, an army general named Santos Mélido Marte visited us. He told us: ‘I have read the Bible, and I know that Jehovah is God. You haven’t done anything deserving of a prison sentence, but I can’t do anything for you because the ones behind your imprisonment are the Catholic bishops. The only ones who can cut your sentence short are those same bishops or the jefe (“the boss,” Trujillo).’”