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. When I asked why, he explained that he often uses “cinema, literature, the humanities, psychoanalysis along with theology, ecclesiology, spirituality” in his retreats and saw no reason not to do so with the Curia as well.
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.”
[The return of the Catholic Movie Club: Why going to the movies is a sacred act]
“It is very easy to reduce even ministry to an ideological or theoretical attitude,” he said. “Cinema, on the other hand, is a form of knowing reality at levels that help us to think, to understand, to find, to attend to different worlds.”
Cardinal Tolentino recalled that while he was in seminary, he and his fellow students went to see “Rocco and His Brothers,” Luchino Visconti’s 1960 film that tells the story of a migrant family from southern Italy and its disintegration in the society of the industrial north. Afterward, they discussed the film, and from that experience he said he “learned not to separate things, saying ‘these are spirituality books, these are poetry books, these are travel books, these are books on dogmatics.’ I do not believe in these separations. A book for travelers can have fundamental insights into spirituality. A book of spirituality must be able to inspire even a filmmaker, even a man working in a bakery and a craftsman.”
“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.”
Pope Francis was present at that retreat, and it was there that the cardinal had his first real conversation with him. Four months later, in June 2018, the pope called him to work in the Roman Curia.
Since then he has met Pope Francis many times. When I asked his impression of the man from these encounters, he said: “I am very impressed by his intelligence. It’s striking, brilliant. When one asks him a question, he responds with intelligence and with depth, and many times in a surprising way takes the issue beyond what you have asked…. I am also struck by his Gospel simplicity. There is in that man the smell of the Gospel; it is deeply touching. I feel I am in front of a man for whom the truth is the truth. I think the church right now has an extraordinary pope, and we have to support him in every way in what he is doing to help the church to be more missionary, more prophetic.”
Inside the Roman Curia
Cardinal Tolentino has worked in the Roman Curia for almost six years, and I asked how he sees the culture there. After a moment’s reflection, he said: “The Curia is very surprising for its quality. There is, in most cases, a level of excellence and dedication that is truly admirable. I see this in my own staff; they are truly prepared, trained people who live this life as a mission. Otherwise, it would be impossible with so few resources to do so much.”
Noting that the Curia is a necessarily diverse environment, he said that “being able to make a body out of all this diversity is not a guarantee. One must make an effort to form a body because otherwise, the entropy of the different diversities could create a set of islands and not really a body.”
He sees in the Curia “the continuation of the broad lines of [Pope Francis’] magisterium and that missionary dimension that is called for in the apostolic constitution ‘Praedicate Evangelium.’ I think today this missionary consciousness is in place and the Curia is serving the Petrine ministry and the local churches. I routinely find this idea of service in the members and structures of the Roman Curia.”
I asked how compatible the cardinal found the atmosphere in the Vatican to be with his life as an intellectual, writer and poet.
“I cherish very much my inner freedom,” he said. “I feel it is a duty to continue to write, to think about having a presence in the [world of] culture as a creator, to continue my journey. Being a cardinal is not a reason to hinder this. On the contrary, it is all the more reason to continue what is also a vocation.”
“Pope Francis helped me a lot when he invited me to always express myself with freedom on this or that aspect,” he said. “When he named me cardinal, that was a surprise for me. Later when I met him, I asked, ‘Holy Father, why did you do this to me?’ He replied, ‘Because you are the poetry.’ Well, it’s not that I am the poetry, but in his mind I represent that share that poetry must have in life. Like St. Francis telling his friars that they should have a garden for the subsistence of the community, but they should also keep a small part of it to plant flowers. So the useful and the useless, and poetry is one of these useless things that give fragrance to life.”
“Poetry does not ask for special conditions to survive,” Cardinal Tolentino said. “We sometimes find flowers growing next to the road or in the middle of terrain that would be said to be difficult or impossible. We see signs of life, signs of inner life. That’s what poetry is like.”
Notwithstanding the tensions, resistance and even conflicts that exist in the church and the Vatican, Cardinal Tolentino said that “Pope Francis brings with him extraordinary poetry. He fills the world with something, with a hope that is a poetic hope for so many women and men of culture, even nonbelievers, who appreciate him very much for his gestures, for his freedom, for his humor, for the surprising elements in his personality.”
The cardinal said that in the church and the Vatican, as in everyday life, “we all endure pains, sufferings, interrogations, dramas.” But, he said, “I think poetry makes us preserve hope because poetry is also a machine for turning suffering into meaning. I think of poets who have experienced situations of extreme suffering such as Sylvia Plath; poetry was the way, the lighthouse, to help her navigate her dark night, and I think poetry, culture is also, one may say, the essence of the Gospel for the church.”
“I don’t see this time in a pessimistic way,” the cardinal said. “And I think the reason why I see it with hope is because I see so many men and women ready to give a second chance to the church, and with Pope Francis they are doing just that, and [he is] reaching so many artists and different persons with very complex life paths. I see how there is a need and a willingness to start again. And I think that should animate the church. The world is ready to give Christianity a second chance. I think Christianity also has to give a second chance to the world and to so many people.”
The church today
Asked what he sees as the most important challenge facing the church today, the cardinal identified it as “the translation of the Christian experience into the languages of our time, and the ability to build community where there was none.” That, too, was the challenge of St. Paul in the Areopagus, he said.
“There is a first proclamation [of the Gospel] that it is necessary to make today, as Pope Francis states clearly in ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ (“The Joy of the Gospel”) because our world is a world that has not already inherited the Christian cultural code,” he said. Cardinal Tolentino emphasized that “the Christian experience cannot just remain fixed in a type of language inherited from the past.”
“This is the missionary challenge that Pope Francis talks about, the missionary dream of reaching everyone,” he said. “I think this is the big challenge for the church today.”
The challenge of forming missionary disciples is at the heart of the ongoing Synod on Synodality, which has its second meeting at the Vatican in October. I asked the cardinal how he viewed this process. “It is a very important synod,” he said, “and I think the question of synodality will mark the church of the future.”
“Pope Francis saw ahead very well when he promoted this Synod on Synodality because the church needs to grow,” the cardinal said. “But in order to grow it has to activate the participation of the baptized, and it is out of this participation that so many other things will be born.” Furthermore, he said, “We have to make being together a resource and see the church not in a pyramidal way but really as a body.”
He believes “the second session of the synod will help us to see clearly that more than this question or the other one, it is precisely the participation and vocation of the baptized that gives the church a synodal face, which will have great importance and consequence for the future.”
As a result of this synod, Cardinal Tolentino envisages “a more communal church, with more shared responsibilities, where the Eucharist is at the center, but also a church that is the starting point for a real commitment of serene and joyful witness in dialogue with the world.”
“I think the church will gain ever more by asking for help instead of feeling self-sufficient, and not saying ‘I can go the course alone, I can make the structures,’ because that is a way of remaining in a monologue,” Cardinal Tolentino said. “The church has to engage in dialogue [with the world] and has to start this dialogue within itself, and for that synodality will be fundamental.”
Editors' note: for more on Gerard O'Connell's work as America's Vatican correspondent, see this interview.
