A revolution towards plenitude

Abstract

In El Evangelio en Solentiname (1979), Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020), a former member of the Sandinista Liberation Front in Nicaragua and later a revolutionary priest who was suspended from priestly ministry in 1984 for his political activism as Minister of Culture, speaks of the spreading of the Gospel in terms of a revolution. El Evangelio en Solentiname is a collection of dialogic ‘homilies’ on the Sunday Gospels. Sunday mass on the Solentiname Islands, where Cardenal founded a lay ‘monastic’ community made up mainly of peasants, was celebrated either in a church building or in the countryside, there where the majority didn’t practise for reasons varying from political ideology, disenchantment, fear of the regime, or also because Cardenal’s community didn’t match the traditional devotional features of religious practice. ‘Homilies’ took the form of a dialogic verse to verse commentary on the gospel of the day, “in a relaxed and spontaneous atmosphere”, sitting at the altar, sometimes even smoking a cigarette to help those present calm down from a tense, hostile social context.