Name Ernesto Cardenal Role Priest | Education Columbia University Siblings Fernando Cardenal | |
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Parents Esmerelda Martinez, Rodolfo Cardenal Awards Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Books Cosmic Canticle, Pluriverse, El Evangelio En Solent, Zero hour and other document, In Cuba Similar People Fernando Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Sergio Ramirez, Claribel Alegria | ||
Ernesto cardenal nicaraguan priest and liberation theologian journal interview
Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (born 20 January 1925) is a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet and politician. He is a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, a party he has since left, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.
Contents
- Ernesto cardenal nicaraguan priest and liberation theologian journal interview
- Nuncio celebrates Mass with Ernesto Cardenal who is readmitted into priesthood
- Life
- Recognition
- References
Nuncio celebrates Mass with Ernesto Cardenal who is readmitted into priesthood
Life
Cardenal was born into an upper-class family in Granada, Nicaragua; he is a first cousin of the poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Cardenal studied literature in Managua and then from 1942 to 1946 in Mexico and from 1947 to 1949 in New York City. In 1949 and 1950 he traveled through Italy, Spain and Switzerland.
In July 1950 he returned to Nicaragua where he participated in the 1954 April Revolution against Anastasio Somoza García's regime. The coup d'état failed and ended with the deaths of many of his associates. Cardenal subsequently entered the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani (Kentucky, United States), joining another poet-priest Thomas Merton, but in 1959 he left to study theology in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Cardenal was ordained a Catholic priest in 1965 in Granada. He went to the Solentiname Islands where he founded a Christian, almost monastic, mainly peasant community, which eventually led to the founding of the artists' colony. This colony engaged with painting, as well as with sculpture, and was visited many times by artists and writers of the region, amongst them, Willarson Brandt, Julio Cortázar and Aedes Margarita. It was there that the famous book El Evangelio en Solentiname ("The Gospel of Solentiname") was written. Cardenal collaborated closely with the leftist Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN) in working to overthrow Anastasio Somoza Debayle's regime.
Many members of the Solentiname community engaged in the revolutionary process through guerrilla warfare that the FSLN had developed to strike at the regime. The year 1977 was crucial to Cardenal's community, when Somoza's National Guard, as a result from an attack to the headquarters stationed in the city of San Carlos a few miles from the community, raided Solentiname and burned it to the ground. Cardenal fled to Costa Rica.
On 19 July 1979, immediately after the Liberation of Managua, he was named Minister of Culture by the new Sandinista regime. He campaigned for a "revolution without vengeance." His brother Fernando Cardenal, also a Catholic priest (in the Jesuit order), was appointed Minister of Education. When Pope John Paul II visited Nicaragua in 1983, he openly scolded Ernesto Cardenal, who knelt before him on the Managua airport runway, for resisting his order to resign from the government, and admonished him: "Usted tiene que arreglar sus asuntos con la Iglesia" ("You must fix your affairs with the Church"). On 4 February 1984 Pope John Paul II defrocked Cardenal because of his participation in liberation theology,. Cardenal remained Minister of Culture until 1987, when his ministry was closed for economic reasons.
Cardenal left the FSLN in 1994, protesting the authoritarian direction of the party under Daniel Ortega but insists that he has retained his leftist opinions, "calling it a robbery of the people and dictatorship not a revolutionary movement" when he left the government. He is a member of the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (Sandinista Renovation Movement, MRS) that participated in the 2006 Nicaraguan general election. Days before the election, Cardenal stated, in a clear reference to his dispute with Ortega: "I think more desirable an authentic capitalism, as Montealegre's (Eduardo Montealegre, the presidential candidate for Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance) would be, than a false Revolution."
He is also a member of the board of advisers of the pan-Latin American TV station teleSUR.
Cardenal has been for a long time a polemical figure in Nicaragua's literary and cultural history. He has been described as "the most important poet right now in Latin America" politically and poetically. He has been a vocal representative for Nicaragua and a key to understanding the contemporary literary and cultural life of Nicaragua. He participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007. During a short visit to India, he made a profound impression on a group of writers called the Hungry generation.
Cardenal's tour of the United States in 2011 to promote his newest work stirred up some controversy, as with the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property that protested his appearances at Catholic universities such as Xavier, Cincinnati, because of his Marxist ideology.