Father
Cardenal defied the Roman Catholic Church in the 1980s by serving as a
minister in the revolutionary government of Nicaragua.
By
The
Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s most admired poets and
priests, who defied the Roman Catholic Church in the 1980s by serving in
the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua, died on Sunday in
Managua, Nicaragua. He was 95.
His personal assistant, Luz Marina Acosta, confirmed his death to The Associated Press.
Born
to a wealthy Nicaraguan family, Father Cardenal became a prominent
intellectual voice of the Nicaraguan revolution and an ardent proponent
of liberation theology, a Christian movement rooted in Marxist
principles and committed to social justice and uplifting the poor. He
was appointed Nicaragua’s first minister of culture after the
Sandinistas overthrew the dictator Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle in
1979.
As the Vatican’s opposition to
liberation theology intensified in the 1980s under Pope John Paul II,
Father Cardenal became a focal point. Before a scheduled visit to
Nicaragua in 1983, the pope publicly demanded that Father Cardenal and
four other priests who had actively supported the revolution resign
their government positions. The Sandinista government refused the demand
to replace them, but said its invitation to the pope still stood.
After
months of public arguing, the pope accepted the invitation and landed
in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. As he walked along a receiving line on
the tarmac shaking hands, the pope seemed taken aback to see Father
Cardenal among the dignitaries.
While
other priests were in clerical garb, Father Cardenal had shown up
wearing a collarless white shirt, slacks and his signature black beret
over his thick white hair. When he knelt to kiss the pope’s ring, the
pope withheld his hand and wagged his finger at him as he spoke to him,
apparently sternly. According to a Vatican official, the pope told
Father Cardenal, “You must straighten out your position with the
church,” The Associated Press reported.
Videotape of the scolding, though not audible, was broadcast around the world.
“Christ
led me to Marx,” Father Cardenal said in an interview in 1984. “I don’t
think the pope understands Marxism. For me, the four gospels are all
equally communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ,
and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.”
His
priestly authority was revoked by Nicaragua’s bishops that same year.
(Three other priests were also disciplined.) Father Cardenal’s suspension was lifted in February 2019, when Pope Francis granted him absolution from “all canonical censorships,” the Vatican News reported.
Father
Cardenal began writing poetry as a young man, tracing the tormented
history of Nicaragua and Latin America as epics in blank verse.
Much
of his poetry, though, was intimate: love poems that recalled the
longings of his youth, finely wrought images of city lights at dusk or
his famous “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe,” in which he describes how Monroe
was found on her deathbed in 1962, “like someone wounded by
gangsters/stretching out his hand to a disconnected telephone.”
Fascinated
by evolution and its lessons for politics, Father Cardenal began to
incorporate science into his poetry in the 1980s. He developed the theme
until the end of his life, marveling at the origins of the universe and
the mysteries of DNA — sources of awe that in his vision brought people
closer to God.
“In this monumental
vision, everything merges and condenses,” the Nicaraguan writer Sergio
Ramírez wrote in the introduction to Father Cardenal’s anthology “Ninety
at Ninety,” which was
published in Spanish in 2014. “Not only do the poet’s intimate personal
experience and the scientific exploration of the heavens enter into the
mystical, so do the memories of his own past.”
The
most recent complete collection of Father Cardenal’s poetry published
in English was “Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems,” (2009, edited and
translated in part by Jonathan Cohen).
Closing the volume was the poem “Stardust,” Father Cardenal’s meditation on death. It concludes:
And the galaxy was taking the shape of a flower
the way it looks now on a starry night.
Our flesh and our bones come from other stars
and perhaps even from other galaxies,
we are universal,
and after death we will help to form other stars
and other galaxies.
We come from the stars, and to them we shall return.
Ernesto
Cardenal Martínez was born on Jan. 20, 1925, to an upper-class family
in Granada, a city on Lake Nicaragua. He studied literature in Managua
and at Columbia University in New York City, where he read Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound.
He
returned to Nicaragua in the 1950s, but after a failed coup against the
Somoza family, he fled and joined the Trappist monastery Gethsemani, in
Kentucky, where he befriended the American monk and writer Thomas
Merton. He was ordained a priest after his subsequent return to
Nicaragua.
Father Cardenal was an
early supporter of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which was
founded in the early 1960s, named after Augusto César Sandino, the
revolutionary who had led a guerrilla campaign against the American
occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and ’30s and was assassinated in
1934.
Father Cardenal furthered the cause after settling on an island in the Solentiname archipelago, in vast Lake Nicaragua near the southern border, in the 1960s. He built a chapel, founded an artists colony, and taught literature and painting to local residents.
His
poetry began to gain recognition. He became known for what he called
his “Epigrams” — lyrical bursts about love and longing mixed with
political and social commentary against the Somoza regime. In one, he
wrote:
I’ve handed out clandestine pamphlets,
yelling: VIVA LA LIBERTAD! In the middle of the street
defying armed guards.
I participated in the April rebellion:
but I grow pale when I pass by your house
and one look from you makes me tremble.
His
sermons, too, were political, full of denunciations of the Somoza
regime. Some of his young parishioners became “guerrilleros,” and the
island became a central military training ground for the Sandinista
movement. After the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, after a bloody
period of rioting, guerrilla resistance and a mass kidnapping operation
in the capital, Father Cardenal was named minister of culture by the
junta leader, Daniel Ortega.
As
a government minister, Father Cardenal sought what he called the
“democratization of culture.” He created poetry workshops around the
country, tapping into Nicaragua’s rich poetic tradition, embodied in
part by Ruben Dario, who spearheaded a Latin American modernist literary
movement in the late 19th century.
But
Father Cardenal’s critics said the ministry was imposing ideological
uniformity by pressuring new writers to produce propaganda, particularly
during the Sandinistas’ long guerrilla war against an American-backed
counterrevolutionary force, known as the contras.
No immediate family members survive. His brother, the Rev. Fernando Cardenal, died in 2016.
Father
Cardenal remained culture minister until 1987, when the ministry was
dissolved and merged with another government agency. In the 1990s he
distanced himself from the Sandinista government and in recent years
criticized what he called the increasingly authoritarian style of Mr. Ortega, who became president in 2007. For Father Cardenal, the Sandinista revolution had failed.
But he remained committed to his Marxist ideals.
“I am a revolutionary,” Father Cardenal said in an interview with The New York Times published in January 2015. “Revolutionary means that I want to change the world.”
He
added: “The Bible is full of revolutions. The prophets are people with a
message of revolution. Jesus of Nazareth takes the revolutionary
message of the prophets. And we also will continue trying to change the
world and make revolution. Those revolutions failed, but others will
come.”
Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting.
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