From a news story by Trinidad Vásquez for ALC. 

The Order is the maximum distinction granted by France since 1802 to persons that make a difference. López said that she receives the recognition at a very difficult time in Nicaragua, where the corruption of the word is a coin of exchange used by whoever has power.  

"The word is vitiated by lying with the purpose of deceiving, transformed into rhetoric, opportunity and rings empty in alienating speeches, especially when they take the name of God in vain," said López in her speech accepting the award.  

María López was born in Cuba but has lived in Nicaragua for the past 33 years. She is the author of the radio series "One Called Jesus.” Sometime ago she left being a nun to become a writer, and has worked for the New Life magazine of Spain, and in the Historical Institute of the Central American University in Managua. 

In speaking to the Nuevo Diario newspaper, López said that she spent 13 years in a convent of the Order of Teresa, believes only in God, and sees the Bible as a book written by men that sought God. "That is why the book is full of genocides, war, norms of violent education, and also poetry and of male dominated concepts, and that cannot be the word of God," she said.

The God in which María López believes is not in the temples. "I find God in the birds, in music, in nature, in poetry," she confessed. She also understands that Jesus did not come to the Earth to suffer, but rather to teach an ethics of human relationships, and that is why they killed him. "It is not necessary to believe that Jesus is God, but to believe in God in the same way that Jesus believed. That formula pleases me more,” she remarked. 

Photo: María López Vigil (Melvin Vargas)