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 the cardinal—commonly referred to by one of his baptismal names, 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.
Childhood in Africa
Cardinal Tolentino was born on the island of Madeira, Portugal, on Dec. 15, 1965, the youngest of five children, and at the age of 1, his family moved to Angola, then a Portuguese colony. “I spent my childhood there, and that certainly marked my life,” he said. “It helped form my soul, my outlook. Not only because the secret of a man is what he experiences in childhood but also because Africa allows us an experience of the world with breadth, with originality, with an intact, still primordial, sense of the world, since Africa makes us feel like the first humans, the first inhabitants of the earth.”
There, he experienced in his heart “spaces without boundaries,” he said, discovering that “space and our way of living have no boundaries.” He recalled, “The spaces were huge, both the convivial spaces and the landscape, and that formed in me a disposition for contemplation, for attention to reality.” He experienced “an enchanted world, not this disenchanted world of modernity, but a world prior to modernity, and that marked me very much afterward.”
“I grew up in a large family, an extended family that included aunts, cousins, like typical big Portuguese families that really like to live together,” the cardinal recalled. “So I spent my childhood not only in my house but in my aunt’s house, and there was no difference between our table and the table of other relatives. So there was really an idea of community that has been with me for as long as I can remember, and the joy of being together.”
His classmates in school and catechesis classes “were African, and I always had a good relationship with them because children move the boundaries; for me there was no difference between a Black African friend and me.” It was only later, he said, “that I reflected on the colonial experience. And recently visiting Angola again, I realized how much the colonial system, which also was a racist system, blocks the reality and does not let fraternity flow in a right way. Today, looking back on my history, I read some episodes as episodes of racism. There were not equal opportunities for everyone, but that was the colonial system that, thank God, has now been overcome.”
Return to Portugal
The Portuguese withdrew from Angola in November 1975 without formally handing over power to any of the independence movements, and many Europeans living there, including the cardinal’s family, fled the country. The cardinal, who was 9 at the time, recalled this as “a dramatic moment. Hundreds of thousands were taken from Angola in an airlift and in ships to return to Portugal with virtually nothing to rebuild their lives. For my parents—like for all the parents of that generation—it was a dramatic challenge because, with their five children, they had to find jobs, find homes, rebuild their life, rebuild everything.”
“That experience brought us very close together,” he said. “It helped me a lot to understand the value of family because in these hours we had nothing left, but we had the family. And slowly with love and by keeping united, we made the way forward.”
“Dramatic as that moment of decolonization was,” he said, “it gave me a great sense of the beauty of the family as a place of safety and the common building of our humanity, and seeing how parents safeguard the joy of their children.” He said he experienced this exodus from Angola “not as a trauma but as an opening of new worlds.”
He recalled the re-entry to Portugal, on the island of Madeira, as something “very nice” because of the influence of his maternal grandmother, who lived with them in Angola. “Although she was an illiterate woman,” the cardinal said, “she introduced us all, her grandchildren, to the oral songbook, telling us the stories, the poems of Portugal, and so when we returned to Madeira it was like going back to the environment of those stories that we used to hear from her in Africa.”
Reflections on Africa
Reflecting on his experience in Africa, Cardinal Tolentino says, “I would say contact with Africa always leaves us with three things. The first is the ‘mal d’Africa,’ or nostalgia. One always wants to go back, it comes from a passion for those people, their spontaneity, and the high human quality that Africans culturally have.”
“Second,” he said, “the youth of Africa; wherever we turn we see children, young people. It is truly a continent where youth has exploded and that is a hope, but also a huge challenge. In terms of education, for example, how to offer educational proposals, how to really promote those generations and not condemn them to an uncertain future, to migration.”
“The third aspect is the pressing need for a framework of international thinking that has respect for the just independence of each country, each people, that can help Africa because there the level of poverty and social inequality is massive. Western countries have a historical responsibility here; that is also a challenge for them, to think of alternative forms of building greater real social justice.”
Cardinal Tolentino rejoices that the Dicastery for Culture and Education can help Africa by investing in and strengthening its university network, which he sees as “a resource of hope for both the church and the society in Africa.”
He noted that the continent also boasts artistic communities “with incredible vitality in all disciplines from a cultural perspective. They can offer testimonies, experiences that can be very enlightening.” He envisages “the increasing inclusion of African artists and theologians in our [dicastery’s] committees” and said that he has seen firsthand “the enthusiasm of African theology.”
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.”
Seminary and poetry
In 1976, a year after returning to Portugal, Cardinal Tolentino entered the minor seminary in Funchal “at the age of 10 or 11.” Today, however, the cardinal does “not recommend so much” such an early entry to the seminary. “I think vocational discernment should be done in a more integrated form in families at an older age. But those were the times, the paradigms that I grew up in.”
Looking back, he recalled that the seminary opened a whole new world for him. “Because it had two huge libraries, it gave me the opportunity to be a reader, an omnivorous reader, as a teenager who appropriates the world through books and culture,” he said.
In the seminary, he said, “I started writing, like many teenagers do.” He remarked, “I think every teenager in the world has written at this age a poem or has tried. But in the case of poets, it is something that becomes more and more serious and it becomes a life issue, and not just an antenna to intercept the world. It also becomes a language, decisive for the lived expression of our worldview.”
He recalled that in those years “the big newspapers had a literary supplement where young poets and writers made their debut. As a seminarian, I, too, made my debut in a national newspaper, Diario de Noticias, where my generation of writers started.”
He acknowledged that “[i]t was a little strange because someone who is in the seminary seems somewhat outside the world.” But, he said, “maybe literature called me to the world, and that also marked a part of my personal history. I felt a very great desire to dialogue with [the world of] my time.”
“I have always had a passion for dialogue with the world,” the cardinal said. “As a priest, I worked for 20 years in a university and that opened me up to a very, very different, interdisciplinary world.”
Asked why or how he started to write poetry, the cardinal said it was difficult to say. “No one knows how poetry came about,” he said. “They say it is related to the worship of the dead. They say it is related to the lullaby of mothers. They say it is the language of childhood. They say it is a very sophisticated form of language. It is not known historically how poetry began as art, as a form of knowledge. Even in a person’s life you don’t know, you don’t know how a poet is made. Certainly, there are conditions of life, sensibility and culture that lead to a certain kind of relationship with language and make language a form of attention, of hospitality, of human experience, of reflection on self.”
Global Studies
Cardinal Tolentino began his studies for the priesthood in 1982 at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon and obtained a licentiate in theology in 1989. In 1990, he was ordained a priest and sent to Rome to pursue a licentiate in biblical studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, which he completed in 1992.
He lived for one year in New York (2011-12), engaging in post-doctoral research on religion and public reason at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University.
He described New York as “one of the world’s most beautiful, most diverse cities.” Indeed, he said that for those who love culture, “it’s kind of like going to the ancient cities; New York is a major landmark.”
He rejoiced that while living there he “was able to follow in the pathway of Dorothy Day” and came to understand “a social Christianity in New York that is closer to the tradition of the social doctrine of the church rather than to cultural power only.” At the same time, he said, “I was also very touched by the loneliness that can be felt walking the city’s streets.”
After returning from New York, he became the vice rector of the Catholic University of Portugal in 2012 and held that post until his move to the Vatican in 2018. He served as the director of the university’s Center for Studies of Religions and Cultures from 2012 to 2017, during which time he held multiple visiting professorships at two Jesuit-led tertiary education institutions in Brazil.
From his long teaching experience, he said he knows that “students are always magnificent because they are in a stage of openness, of curiosity.” But he was especially impressed by “the quality” and “freedom of association in reading” of the students in Brazil. For example, he said, “they would take a contemporary philosopher together with a church father and do so with a naturalness that is not usual in Europe…. They put it all together with creativity and a depth that amazed and fascinated me.”
He is impressed, too, by the Latin American bishops and how they have worked together in the episcopal conference of Latin America and the Caribbean, “notwithstanding the fact that they have two different languages and very different cultures and histories; they produced something together that is really admirable and sets an example for the other continents.”
Cardinal Tolentino pointed especially to what the bishops achieved at their gathering in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007, “where [Cardinal] Bergoglio played a very important role.” He hailed Aparecida as “a key moment in the contemporary church” and said that in a certain way, “it could only happen in Latin America because the episcopates made a journey together, also in their differences, a journey truly together of church. And that is what I admire most.”
Part II of this interview will be published tomorrow.
Editors' note: for more on Gerard O'Connell's work as America's Vatican correspondent, see this interview.
