On July 10, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça sat down for an hour-long interview with Gerard O’Connell, America’s Vatican correspondent. The cardinal—commonly referred to by one of his baptismal names, Tolentino—was made prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education in 2022. Part I of the interview can be found here.
In November 2017, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça met Pope Francis for the first time at a plenary meeting of the Pontifical Council for Culture, of which he was a consultant, and “was able to greet him,” he said. At the time, he was the vice rector of the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon.
To his utter surprise, soon after, Francis asked him to preach the Roman Curia’s Lenten retreat, February 2018, in Ariccia, about an hour’s drive in the hills outside Rome.
In that retreat, Cardinal Tolentino said among many other things that a priest should see movies.
He said he encourages priests to see films because “a priest must be an expert in humanity, and all our experiences of humanity are limited…. Cinema allows us to create relationships of empathy, of listening to figures and to life situations very different from our own.” He said it is “absolutely necessary” for priests “to understand the complexity of the human soul” in order to “serve in the way Pope Francis repeatedly calls us to do.”
“True wisdom must have the ability to speak to everyone,” Cardinal Tolentino said. “This has been a concern all along in my ministry, that of finding a language that can speak to everyone, to be understood by everyone. That’s also why I chose as the motto of my episcopate, ‘Look at the lilies of the field,’ because it’s one of those phrases of Jesus that a gardener, but also a theologian, can understand.”
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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 and Gerard O’Connell, where this article originally appeared.
