Faith & Joy: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Priest by Fernando Cardenal, S.J. (review)

Along the way of becoming current Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, called himself a “Sandinista”. That label makes him a companero of our author, Jesuit Father Fernando Cardenal, who in 1995 wrote a letter resigning from the Party not because they lost an election but because of the corruption of the Party while in power:

Letter to my brother and sister Sandinistas

Twenty-three years ago I joined the Sandinista Front to begin the most beautiful and thrilling period of my life. . . . I came to love the Sandinista Revolution more than my life, and I was always willing to sacrifice anything, even things very dear to me. Following my conscience, I remained in the revolution and I accepted the pressure, censorship and punishments that came from Rome.

The choices that brought on these troubles is the deeply moving story of these memoirs.

The spiritual formation of a Jesuit is lengthy and serious. Yet toward the end of this arduous journey, Cardenal had a further experience that changed everything for him. In Medellin, Colombia, he was among nine or ten Jesuits in a formation house in a desperately poor neighborhood where he had the daily chore of going for the community bread. During his return home, hungry children would beg for a piece of the bread they saw him carrying. He arrived back with no bread and resigned the daily chore. A transformation had begun for Fernando Cardenal by way of this and similar experiences that were never part of his years in Jesuit houses of formation, usually quiet and remote, and removed from the immediate experience of urban and even rural poverty.

Back in Managua, Nicaragua, this changed man was appointed Assistant to the President of the Jesuit University (UCA) where, on the first day of work, he joined a student sit-in at the university and later at the cathedral. The university President, who had been his close friend and spiritual director, soon fired him. All of this from a Cardenal who describes himself thus: “I have always been an insecure person, and my worries and fears frequently overwhelm me.” He tells also his lifelong colitis and forty years of daily headaches, more or less severe according to his worries.

Free from an official job, Fernando was now able to work on his own. He began to associate with students so poor that they could not attend a university, Catholic youth groups like the Cursillo and the Young Catholic Worker Movement and the Evangelical Youth Movement. He was delighted with the spirit of these youth and their passion to remove the oppressive Somoza Government from power.

The real test of his efforts came with his appointment as Minister of Education and thus an official of the Sandinista Government when it came into power. The Nicaraguan bishops saw him as a Marxist introducing literacy programs from Communist Cuba and the consciousness raising pedagogy of the great Brazilian Paulo Friere: “not a pedagogical event with political implications but a political event with pedagogical implications.” Considerable support, however, did come from his Jesuit community and superiors and even Cardinal Secretary of State Agostino Casoroli in his seeing Sandinista Nicaragua as a possible rapprochement in dialogue with Marxism.

Pope John Paul II apparently saw things differently: the three priests in government office should resign and return to more ecclesial ministry. The three were Fernando, and his brother, Ernesto, priest and poet, and Maryknoller Miguel d’Escoto. This verdict was the final one.

All three accepted the suspension from the Priesthood and for Jesuit Fernando the further difficulty was that he either accepted the decision from Rome or he need withdraw from the Society of Jesus altogether. Father Cardenal refused to withdraw from the Society voluntarily saying that such a departure would be contrary to his Jesuit vow of poverty which he saw fulfilled in his work with the revolution. Thus they would have to dismiss him. In the preface to...