José Tolentino de Mendonça is known in Rome as “the poet cardinal” because Pope Francis told him “you are the poetry” in the College of Cardinals when he gave him the red hat. That was on Oct. 6, 2019, when he served as the archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church, a post he held from 2018 to 2022. In 2022, the pope appointed Cardinal Tolentino as prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education.
Today, the 58-year-old Portuguese cardinal is widely recognized not only as a poet—he represented Portugal at World Poetry Day in 2014—but also as one of the leading intellectuals of the Roman Curia. The seventh-youngest member of the College of Cardinals, he organized two significant cultural events this year involving Pope Francis. The first was the pope’s encounter with artists in a women’s prison at the Venice Biennale contemporary art festival on April 28; the second was the meeting with some of the world’s most famous comedians in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall on June 14.
To learn more about this poet, theologian and intellectual, I sat down with Cardinal Tolentino on July 10 for an hour-long interview in the dicastery that he leads, with a breathtaking view of St. Peter’s Basilica. The interview is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on his early life in Angola, his entry to the seminary and debut as a teenage poet in a leading Portuguese daily, and his teaching experience in Catholic universities in Brazil. Part II speaks of his relationship with Pope Francis, life in the Roman Curia, the main challenges facing the church today and his view of the Synod on Synodality.
Reflecting on the role of the Catholic Church in Africa, Cardinal Tolentino said: “The church [there] really anticipated what European nations understood only later…for example, by entrusting whole episcopates to native priests like in the case of Angola or by fostering the life of local communities in Africa.” He recalled that when Pope Paul VI received the leaders of the independence movements of the former Portuguese colonies at the Vatican in 1970, it was viewed with hostility by the authoritarian government of António de Oliveira Salazar.
“It means the church has had a prophetic role,” the cardinal said, “and I think it continues to have it today because we can’t think of the future without Africa, although the levels of development don’t seem to be at the level of the so-called First-World countries. Nevertheless, they have anthropological resources, future resources, beyond our own. That we promote the dialogue, the collaboration, the integration of Africa in everything we do and think is so important.”
To continue reading this article, click here.
Gerard O’Connell is America’s Vatican correspondent and author of The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Story of the Conclave That Changed History. He has been covering the Vatican since 1985.
With thanks to America, where this article originally appeared.
