Nicaragua mourns one of its greatest men. Figure of the Sandinista revolution and pillar of Liberation Theology, the priest Ernesto Cardenal, died Sunday March 1 at the age of 95 years.

"He died today. He went away in absolute peace, he did not suffer," Luz Marina Acosta, his collaborator for over forty years, told AFP. The priest, hospitalized since Wednesday, died of cardiac arrest. "He died like a little bird, he gradually died out," said his assistant.

Three days of national mourning in Nicaragua

President Daniel Ortega, who was his comrade in arms with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) during the revolution before the two men fell out in the 1990s, immediately declared three days of national mourning in Nicaragua. The government "will join the ceremonies of thanks and farewells to this Nicaraguan brother," the executive said in a statement.

Born January 20, 1925 in Granada, near the capital Managua, Ernesto Cardenal was ordained a Trappist priest in 1965, after studying philosophy and literature in the United States and Mexico. He was one of the main cantors of Liberation Theology, a social movement from the Catholic Church, tinged with Marxism and developed in Latin America in the 1970s. He had participated in the Sandinista revolution which, in 1979, had led to the fall of the authoritarian regime of Anastasio Somoza.

Reprimanded by John Paul II

In his Memoirs, Cardenal stated that his life had always been "guided by God", who had given him the inspiration to "become a revolutionary long before the appearance of the FSLN" in 1961. Became Minister of Culture in the first government of the FSLN, he had been publicly reprimanded by John Paul II on the tarmac at Managua airport when he arrived in 1983 for an official visit.

The Polish pope had refused his blessing to the priest-minister, kneeling before him, and, an imperious raised finger, had severed him by asking him to "be reconciled first with the Church". Two years later, the priest having not left his political office, the pope had suspended him "a divinis".

Ernesto Cardenal had then become one of the main slayers of John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI, whose pontificates had, according to him, made the Catholic Church back down. The suspension had been lifted by Pope Francis in February 2019. Ernesto Cardenal, wearing the stole, symbol of his recovered priestly powers, had then received the Eucharist from the hands of the apostolic nuncio on his hospital bed, where he was treated for kidney problems.

Several times approached for the Nobel Prize in Literature, without ever obtaining it, he was the author of several poetic works such as "Hora Cero" ("The Zero Hour") or "Oracion por Marilyn Monroe y otros poemas" (" Prayer for Marilyn Monroe and other poems "). It was translated into around twenty languages.

With AFP

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