Ernesto Cardenal

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Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (born January 20, 1925) is a Catholic priest and was one of the most famous liberation theologians of the Nicaraguan Revolution. He is also famous as a poet, and he still writes. He was also the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands.

Born into a rich family in Granada, Nicaragua, he studied literature first in Managua and from 1942 to 1946 in Mexico. Later, from 1947 to 1949, he continued his studies in New York and travelled through Italy, Spain and Switzerland between 1949 and 1950.

In July 1950, he returned to Nicaragua, where he participated in the 1954 "April Revolution" against Anastasio Somoza García's régime. The coup d'état failed and ended with the deaths of many of his comrades and friends. Ernesto Cardenal decided to enter the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani (Kentucky, United States), under the other poet-priest Thomas Merton, but in 1959 he left to study theology in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Cardenal was ordained a Catholic priest in 1965 in Managua. He went to the Solentiname Islands where he founded a Christian, almost monastic, community, which eventually led to the founding of the artists' colony. It was there that the famous book El Evangelio de Solentiname ("The Gospel of Solentiname") was written. Cardenal collaborated closely with the Sandinista National Liberation Front, fighting against Anastasio Somoza Debayle's régime. On 19 July 1979, the day of victory in the Nicaraguan Revolution, he was named Minister of Culture by the new Sandinista government. He occupied this office until 1987, when his ministry was closed owing to economic reasons. When Pope John Paul II visited Nicaragua in 1983, he openly scolded Cardenal, who knelt before him on the Managua airport runway, for resisting his order to resign from the government. The Pope admonished Cardenal: "Regularize your position with the Church."

Ernesto Cardenal received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1980.

Cardenal left the FSLN in 1994, protesting the authoritarian direction (in his eyes) of the party by Daniel Ortega but kept his political convictions. He is a member in the board of advisers of the newly launched TV station TeleSUR.

He was recently (May 2005) nominated to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.