Fr Ernesto Cardenal
Nicaraguan priest, poet and liberation theologian who was disciplined by Pope John Paul II
FATHER Ernesto Cardenal, who died last Sunday aged 95, was one of the most extraordinary Catholic priests of the 20th Century, combining the roles, not always happily, of poet, Marxist revolutionary, mystic, monk, sculptor, academic and politician in his native Nicaragua, as well as becoming a familiar figure on the international circuit.
Born on January 20, 1925, into a privileged family in Granada, Nicaragua, Cardenal began his university studies in literature first in Managua, and later at university in Mexico.
In the post-war period he studied at Columbia University in New York, and then went on an extended tour of Europe before returning home to Nicaragua in 1950. During this period his first poems appeared in print.
In 1954, there was an attempted revolution against the repressive regime of the American-backed President Anastasio Somoza. The young Cardenal was implicated in this failed coup d’etat and he subsequently left for America, where, after undergoing a religious conversion, he decided to become a monk, joining the Trappist Monastery at Gethsemane in Kentucky.
In 1959, Cardenal transferred to another monastery in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and in 1965 he was ordained as a diocesan priest in his home town of Granada.
He was assigned to the parish of the Solentiname Islands, an idyllic archipelago in the middle of Nicaragua’s largest lake.
It was while posted on the islands that his book El Evangelio de Solentiname (“The Gospel in Solentiname”) emerged.
It became a classic work of liberation theology.
Also dating from this period were Cardenal’s Psalms of Struggle and Liberation ,a retelling of the Psalms influenced by the revolutionary struggle then going on in the country against the Somoza dictatorship.
In 1970, Father Cardenal visited Cuba, and this led to what he called a second conversion, this time to Christian Marxism and revolutionary fervour. In 1977, the National Guard raided the islands and burned the base community to the ground, in reprisal for an anti-government attack in the provincial capital.
Cardenal fled to Costa Rica.
He later joined the rebels and became their field chaplain.
Two years later, the tables were turned, and the Sandinistas’ insurgency overthrew the dictatorship, while Somoza fled the country.
As soon at the Sandinistas took power, Father Cardenal was appointed minister of culture.
The new minister was now at the centre of a regime that, though it had come to power through a violent insurgency, was greatly admired by the international left and many progressive Catholics the world over.
While his brother Fernando, another priest, took over as minister of education, Ernesto Cardenal campaigned for what he termed “a revolution without vengeance”.
But when Pope John Paul II visited Nicaragua in 1983, Father Cardenal was there to greet him on his knees on the runway of Managua airport.
Despite this show of humility and loyalty, Cardenal won a finger-wagging rebuke from the Pontiff, who reminded him that as a priest he was forbidden by canon law to have any active political role.
The next year, after Cardenal had failed to resign from government, he incurred the canonical penalty of loss of the clerical state.
This meant that, while still a priest, he was forbidden to practise as such.
He was to remain culture minister until 1987.
Only in 2014, 30 years later, was Cardenal’s laicisation rescinded, on the initiative of Pope Francis.
Cardenal left the Sandinista movement in 1994, though he continued to describe himself as a Christian Marxist.
By this time he was one of the most recognisable Nicaraguans on the planet, thanks to his poetry, which was widely admired.
Later, his poetic spirit was drawn to other subjects, in particular to ecology and the celebration of the work of Charles Darwin, in whom he saw some echoes of Christian metaphysics.
Travelling the world, receiving prizes and giving poetry readings, Cardenal became a fixture on the international stage.
He continued to describe the Nicaraguan experience of the Sandinista government as “a beautiful revolution”.
Though championed by the left, and lovers of Latin American literature, he was anathema to conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States, who saw in the beret-clad priest, at worst, one whose Christianity had been seriously and dangerously eroded by Marxism, or at best a dreamer and deluded idealist.