A veteran commentator on Latin America offers his appreciation of the Nicaraguan priest, poet and revolutionary politician who died earlier this month aged 95 in Managua

Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan priest, poet and revolutionary, who died on 1 March, became world famous through a news photo: Pope John Paul II in March 1983 wagging his finger at the kneeling Cardenal at Managua airport and telling him to quit his post as minister of culture in the Sandinista government. The Polish Pope was fiercely anti-communist, whereas Cardenal, despite his middle-class origins, was a revolutionary from his youth. Born in Granada, in western Nicaragua, he took part in an unsuccessful uprising against the Somoza dictatorship in 1954.

In 1956, after studies in the United States, he had a religious conversion and became a novice in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where the novice-master was Thomas Merton. Merton made a huge impression on Cardenal, who later described him as his “spiritual father”. But Cardenal’s health could not stand the rigours of Trappist life, and Merton advised him to try a different path. He returned to Nicaragua and after ordination in 1962 founded a religious community on the island of Solentiname, part of an archipelago in Lake Nicaragua. The community became famous through the book, The Gospel of Solentiname, reflections on the Gospels from community members combined with primitivist paintings. Cardenal said of the community: “We taught them crafts, we developed primitivist painting, we explored liberation theology through the revolutionary reading of the Bible.”