From Ten Reasons with my emphases:
You really can’t make this stuff up. Ernesto Cardenal, the Jesuit Marxist liberation theologian who served in the violent Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua during the 1980s, is visiting Xavier University. Cardenal was captured in a now famous photograph asking for Pope John Paul II’s blessing as the Holy Father arrived in Managua in 1983 and instead got a stern reprimand. He was later suspended from the priesthood. Details of his visit are available on the always curious Xavier University activities calendar:
Father Ernesto Cardenal, one of the greatest living poets from Latin America, is a priest from Nicaragua. He was an active member of the Sandinista movement. As minister of culture he was also one of three priests to hold a position in the Sandinista government. The Academic Service Learning Semesters and Voices of Solidarity will be hosting a bilingual poetry reading to introduce Fr. Cardenal’s latest book: The Origin of Species and Other Poems. The event will take place in the afternoon.The event is also promoted on the website of Xavier University’s Bellarmine Chapel, home parish of the head of the troubled archdiocesan Social Action office. In 1999, the Miami Herald published a “Where Are They Now?” piece on Cardenal and other Sandinista radicals.
Who knows? Perhaps Ernesto Cardenal will stand up and tell the crowd how wrong he was back then, how he repents of ever having been involved in that compromised and distorted “theology” and hopes that young people will avoid making the same mistakes he did.
Who knows?
