“I see the new day, an earth without terror, without the tyranny of a dynasty!”
Father Ernesto Cardenal, who collaborated with the Sandinista National Liberation Front in the revolution that ended the dictatorship of then-president of Nicaragua Anastasio Somoza, died on March 1 at the age of 95. He was the poet of the Revolution, a priest with profound Christian love, a revolutionary, a man that battled injustice.
Father Cardenal was born on 20 January 1925 to a wealthy family in Granada on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. He studied literature in Mexico and at Columbia University in New York, the United States (US).
Back in Nicaragua, he took part in a 1954 plot to topple Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza and briefly went into hiding. There he realised his spiritual calling and he joined the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, US, where his novice master was none other than Trappist mystic, Father Thomas Merton.
Two years later, for health reasons, he left the monastery. However, his deep relationship with Father Merton continued. Father Cardenal retained monastic ways throughout his life, waking at 3.00am every day to meditate.
After his ordination in 1965, he founded a pastoral artistic community on the Solentiname Islands on Lake Nicaragua. Father Merton supported his decision to start the experimental community.
A volume of their correspondence shows just how deeply Father Merton identified with Father Cardenal, a fellow poet and mystic, and his dreams of pioneering a new model of monasticism. Father Merton himself dreamed of joining Father Cardenal. But that was not to be.
Before he died, Father Merton wrote the introduction to Vida en Amor (Abide in Love), a deeply lyrical book of reflections by Father Cardenal.He wrote: “In a time of conflict, anxiety, war, cruelty, and confusion, the reader may be surprised that this book is a hymn in praise of love, telling us that ‘all things love one another’.”
The community went on to become a revolutionary base of sorts in the armed struggle against the Somoza dynasty. Father Cardenal had been a leading light in the liberation theology movement that preached social justice for the poor and freedom for the oppressed.
When the Sandinista National Liberation Front ousted Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Father Cardenal was named Minister of Culture in the new government, an office that he held until 1987. However, canon law forbids clerics from assuming public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power.
In 1983, after resisting the Church’s demand that he quit his political office, Father Cardenal’s attempt to greet Pope John Paul II on his arrival in Managua earned a stern rebuke. As he knelt to kiss the pope’s ring, the pope told him sternly to “straighten out your position with the Church.” When he did not, he was stripped of his right to conduct priestly duties, a ban that lasted over 30 years.
Disgusted with what he said had become another dictatorship, Father Cardenal quit his office as minister in 1987 and became a fierce critic of the regime of Daniel Ortega, who has ruled Nicaragua for 24 years (1985 to 1990; 2007 to the present).
Father Ernesto Cardenal’s figure had grown so large that he’s now considered one of the great poets of universal literature.
In 2012, he was awarded the Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, the most important honour of its kind within the Spanish-speaking world. His principal work is titled Cosmic Canticle, which literary critics have classified as a masterpiece of literature.
Father Cardenal’s poetry moved amid themes of love, erotic passion, religion and science; between the mystic and the scientific. Being a priest, he began an interior voyage to sing about the origin of the universe, its evolution and the scientific knowledge that illuminates it, through which he discerned the hand of God the Creator.
Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, he once said the accolade only appealed because it came with “a lot of money which I’d give to the poor.”
He was proud of his life as a poet and as a Trappist. He stated that “he was born a poet” because he had been writing poetry from the time he was six. “Before I could write, I would recite poems. I’d learn them by heart,” he had said. “Later, I became a religious devotee,” referring to his time in a Trappist monastery. “Later, I found my revolutionary vocation” in the 1970s. From that time forward: “I’ve been a poet, a priest and a revolutionary,” he had said in an interview.
Father Cardenal penned harsh criticisms of Ortega’s regime and about China’s ambitions to split Nicaragua with a canal. “Let the whole world know what’s happening in Nicaragua!” he cried at one of the annual Poetry Festivals in Grenada.
Over the past two years, as young people rose up in protest against the Ortega government, Father Cardenal spoke out in support of them. Sadly, the dispute with Ortega followed him to the grave.
In 2019, Pope Francis lifted the canonical sanctions against the ailing Father Cardenal, effectively reinstating him as an active priest.
Ironically for a cleric who once challenged the Catholic Church’s authority, it was the Vatican that came to his defense. Father Cardenal’s funeral Mass at Managua Metropolitan Cathedral on March 3 was disrupted by flag-waving Sandinista militants, who angrily denounced him as a traitor.
Supporters of Ortega and his powerful wife, Rosario Murillo, burst into the cathedral yelling “traitor” to disrupt his funeral Mass. Appealing for calm, the papal nuncio, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw, told the mob he would get down on his knees if necessary.
It was a sign of how respected Father Cardenal, who once said “Christ led me to Marx,” had become.
