12 March 2020, The Tablet
Ernesto Cardenal remembered: A true radical to the last
Ernesto Cardenal
Photos: PA/DPA
Photos: PA/DPA
A veteran commentator on
Latin America offers his appreciation of the Nicaraguan priest, poet and
revolutionary politician who died earlier this month aged 95 in Managua
Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan priest, poet and revolutionary, who died on 1 March, became world famous through a news photo: Pope John Paul II in March 1983 wagging his finger at the kneeling Cardenal at Managua airport and telling him to quit his post as minister of culture in the Sandinista government. The Polish Pope was fiercely anti-communist, whereas Cardenal, despite his middle-class origins, was a revolutionary from his youth. Born in Granada, in western Nicaragua, he took part in an unsuccessful uprising against the Somoza dictatorship in 1954.
In 1956, after studies in the United States, he had a religious conversion and became a novice in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where the novice-master was Thomas Merton. Merton made a huge impression on Cardenal, who later described him as his “spiritual father”. But Cardenal’s health could not stand the rigours of Trappist life, and Merton advised him to try a different path. He returned to Nicaragua and after ordination in 1962 founded a religious community on the island of Solentiname, part of an archipelago in Lake Nicaragua. The community became famous through the book, The Gospel of Solentiname, reflections on the Gospels from community members combined with primitivist paintings. Cardenal said of the community: “We taught them crafts, we developed primitivist painting, we explored liberation theology through the revolutionary reading of the Bible.”
But the fight against the dictatorship was continuing. In 1977, after some members of the community joined an attack on a National Guard barracks, government forces destroyed the community’s base and Cardenal had to flee to Costa Rica. When the revolution triumphed in 1979, he was invited to become minister of culture, one of four priests in the Sandinista government: his brother Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit, minister of education; Miguel D’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, foreign minister; and Edgard Parrales, a diocesan priest, Nicaragua’s representative to the Organization of American States. All four were suspended from priestly ministry. As minister of culture, Cardenal set up poetry and drama workshops throughout the country. As he said in 1983, “workers, Indians, rural people, maids, soldiers, police made poetry, and good modern poetry”. Cardenal noted that this astonished a Tablet correspondent.
Cardenal wrote poetry, even as a young man, including love poetry and poetry attacking the dictatorship. In 1960, he published versions of some of the psalms (translated as The Psalms of Love and Liberation). A 1965 collection includes the moving “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” – “who, like any other shopgirl, dreamed of being a star”. In later life he became fascinated by science (and a regular reader of the Scientific American), and this side of his work resulted in the volume The Cosmic Canticles. His work was highly praised, and is often compared with that of the Nicaraguan modernist poet Rubén Darío and the Chilean Pablo Neruda.
In 1990, the Nicaraguan people, weary of the war against the US-backed contras, voted the Sandinistas out of office, but the greater defeat was a moral one. Before leaving office, many of the leaders enriched themselves by seizing public assets in what their one-time adviser, Jesuit Xabier Gorostiaga, called a “demoralising ethical hara-kiri”. Cardenal and Ramírez left the Sandinistas and formed the Sandinista Renewal Movement.
The Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was re-elected president in 2006 and introduced an authoritarian regime that reduced the scope for opposition and removed limits on presidential terms. Cardenal dismissed it as a “dictatorship” and during his funeral on 3 March, Sandinista supporters invaded Managua’s cathedral and yelled “Traitor!” at his coffin.
In the last five years Cardenal’s health worsened, though in 2015 he told a reporter that he got up at 3 a.m. and prayed for an hour. His prayer, he said, had become “increasingly simple … I am only concentrated on experiencing God.” In 2019, Pope Francis lifted all ecclesiastical sanctions, and the apostolic nuncio visited him in hospital where they celebrated together what his friend, the novelist Sergio Ramírez, a former vice president in the Sandinista government, called “a Mass of glory”.
Ernesto Cardenal, priest, poet and revolutionary, born Granada,
Nicaragua, 20 January 1925; died Managua, Nicaragua, 1 March 2020.
Francis McDonagh writes on Latin America for The Tablet.
Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan priest, poet and revolutionary, who died on 1 March, became world famous through a news photo: Pope John Paul II in March 1983 wagging his finger at the kneeling Cardenal at Managua airport and telling him to quit his post as minister of culture in the Sandinista government. The Polish Pope was fiercely anti-communist, whereas Cardenal, despite his middle-class origins, was a revolutionary from his youth. Born in Granada, in western Nicaragua, he took part in an unsuccessful uprising against the Somoza dictatorship in 1954.
In 1956, after studies in the United States, he had a religious conversion and became a novice in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where the novice-master was Thomas Merton. Merton made a huge impression on Cardenal, who later described him as his “spiritual father”. But Cardenal’s health could not stand the rigours of Trappist life, and Merton advised him to try a different path. He returned to Nicaragua and after ordination in 1962 founded a religious community on the island of Solentiname, part of an archipelago in Lake Nicaragua. The community became famous through the book, The Gospel of Solentiname, reflections on the Gospels from community members combined with primitivist paintings. Cardenal said of the community: “We taught them crafts, we developed primitivist painting, we explored liberation theology through the revolutionary reading of the Bible.”
But the fight against the dictatorship was continuing. In 1977, after some members of the community joined an attack on a National Guard barracks, government forces destroyed the community’s base and Cardenal had to flee to Costa Rica. When the revolution triumphed in 1979, he was invited to become minister of culture, one of four priests in the Sandinista government: his brother Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit, minister of education; Miguel D’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, foreign minister; and Edgard Parrales, a diocesan priest, Nicaragua’s representative to the Organization of American States. All four were suspended from priestly ministry. As minister of culture, Cardenal set up poetry and drama workshops throughout the country. As he said in 1983, “workers, Indians, rural people, maids, soldiers, police made poetry, and good modern poetry”. Cardenal noted that this astonished a Tablet correspondent.
Cardenal wrote poetry, even as a young man, including love poetry and poetry attacking the dictatorship. In 1960, he published versions of some of the psalms (translated as The Psalms of Love and Liberation). A 1965 collection includes the moving “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” – “who, like any other shopgirl, dreamed of being a star”. In later life he became fascinated by science (and a regular reader of the Scientific American), and this side of his work resulted in the volume The Cosmic Canticles. His work was highly praised, and is often compared with that of the Nicaraguan modernist poet Rubén Darío and the Chilean Pablo Neruda.
In 1990, the Nicaraguan people, weary of the war against the US-backed contras, voted the Sandinistas out of office, but the greater defeat was a moral one. Before leaving office, many of the leaders enriched themselves by seizing public assets in what their one-time adviser, Jesuit Xabier Gorostiaga, called a “demoralising ethical hara-kiri”. Cardenal and Ramírez left the Sandinistas and formed the Sandinista Renewal Movement.
The Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was re-elected president in 2006 and introduced an authoritarian regime that reduced the scope for opposition and removed limits on presidential terms. Cardenal dismissed it as a “dictatorship” and during his funeral on 3 March, Sandinista supporters invaded Managua’s cathedral and yelled “Traitor!” at his coffin.
In the last five years Cardenal’s health worsened, though in 2015 he told a reporter that he got up at 3 a.m. and prayed for an hour. His prayer, he said, had become “increasingly simple … I am only concentrated on experiencing God.” In 2019, Pope Francis lifted all ecclesiastical sanctions, and the apostolic nuncio visited him in hospital where they celebrated together what his friend, the novelist Sergio Ramírez, a former vice president in the Sandinista government, called “a Mass of glory”.
Francis McDonagh writes on Latin America for The Tablet.
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