MEXICO CITY — ERNESTO CARDENAL is a poet and a priest, a revolutionary and a mystic. His poetry speaks of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Darwin, of Spanish conquistadors and pre-Columbian gods. Science saturates his writing.

“Science brings me close to God because it describes the universe and creation, and that brings me close to the creator,” said Nicaragua’s most prominent living poet in an interview a few weeks before his 90^th birthday. “For me this is a prayer.”

As he reaches the twilight of his life, Father Cardenal is being celebrated with a new anthology of his poems: “Ninety at Ninety.”

Many of those works emanate from 20^th-century struggles: a commitment to social justice rooted in faith and a fight for national sovereignty. The language may sound a little dated in English, but not in Spanish.

“I am a revolutionary,” Father Cardenal declared with vigor. “Revolutionary means that I want to change the world.”

He has been fighting for change since the 1950s, in an early aborted revolt against the brutal, kleptocratic Somoza dynasty, in his poetry and then as part of the left-wing Sandinista uprising in 1979 that overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle. He was long at odds with the Vatican hierarchy, staying faithful to the doctrine of liberation theology as Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI remade the Roman Catholic Church in their conservative mold. Long disillusioned by the Sandinistas, however, he is now an outspoken opponent.

To Father Cardenal, who has been fighting for change since the 1950s, science shows why tyranny will ultimately crumble. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
In Latin America, his denunciations of the prevailing order still ring true. “To close one’s eyes in the face of inequality and injustice would be absurd,” Sergio Ramírez, the Nicaraguan writer who compiled the anthology, wrote in an email. “One has a dual role which sometimes converts into just one: that of the writer and of the citizen.”

“The writer who denounces, criticizes, rises up against power, defies the establishment” is a concept that is still very much alive in Latin America, Mr. Ramírez continued.

FATHER CARDENAL is more reclusive these days, surrounded by science books at home in Managua. But public readings “sustain me,” he said.

That was clear as he walked onto the stage of this city’s Palacio de Bellas Artes last month wearing a long poncho — not quite the white cassock of his early days as a priest — and his ever-present black beret to a rapturous reception from the audience.

Sharing reflections before each poem, Father Cardenal drew a cloak of intimacy around what has been a very public life.

There was the moment when he read of Marilyn Monroe’s death on a notice board at the seminary in Colombia, and the homage to Thomas Merton, the American monk and writer, who “revealed to me everything that was valuable of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.”

He recalled the tranquillity of a boat ride back to the peasant community he had founded on the islands of Solentiname in Lake Nicaragua, and he repeated his wonder at the knowledge that all life evolved from a single cell.

That fascination with evolution recurs through much of his later work. In the last poem in the anthology, “The Saga of the Third Chimpanzee,” Father Cardenal describes how speech distinguishes humans from the other primates, but in the final lines he makes a plea for humility.

“The third chimpanzee has dominated earth/ the one that made Chartres and the Sistine Chapel/ and now begins to explore space/ he is speaking to the stars/ that have yet to respond/ has seen the birth of the Big Bang/ from which everything was born and he was born/ and like a baby with his mother/burst into babbling with God.”

The laws of science are not just a source of awe and poetry to Father Cardenal. Their transformative force has a greater purpose. To illustrate what he meant, he repeated these lines from his 1989 “Cosmic Canticle,” an epic musing on the origin of the universe:

“Biology also teaches:/ the peaceful animals are favored by selection/ The murderous groups in the same species do not prosper/ (Somozas, Pinochet, etc.)”

TO Father Cardenal, science shows why tyranny will ultimately crumble.

“We have to have hope that the world will change,” he elaborated. “And, going back to modern science, it has been shown, with the discovery of the Big Bang, the great explosion in which the whole cosmos was born, that we are in an incomplete universe. That is why there is evolution — because the universe is incomplete.”

He has been consistent throughout his own evolution, but it has taken him to very different places.

Born to a prosperous Nicaraguan family, Father Cardenal left at 18 to study literature, first in Mexico and then at Columbia University in New York, where he read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound. After he returned to Nicaragua, in 1950, he opened a bookstore and followed the social pursuits of a well-born young man. But politics intruded. His poetry attacked the brutality of the Somoza dictatorship, and he joined an uprising in 1954, only to see its leaders captured and killed.

He changed course suddenly in 1957, when he chose to enter the Trappist monastery at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he studied with Father Merton.

From then on, wrote Mr. Ramírez in his introduction to the new anthology, Father Cardenal “would begin to live a deep religiosity which with time would carry him to the terrain of liberating mysticism and political commitment rooted in faith.”

Ordained in 1965, he returned to Nicaragua and founded the community on Solentiname (pronounced so-LEN-teh-NAH-me), a model of liberation theology’s Marxist-infused commitment to the poor. It was razed by the government in 1977, but by then Father Cardenal had joined the Sandinistas. He became culture minister after their revolution prevailed two years later.

Father Cardenal’s political role brought condemnation from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II pointed an angry finger at him as he knelt on the tarmac to receive the pontiff at the beginning of a visit to Nicaragua in 1983, a moment captured in a now-famous photograph. Two years later, the pope stripped him of his right to administer sacraments.

ALTHOUGH he has praised the current pope, Francis, calling his arrival at the Vatican “a miracle,” he has not asked to have his priestly duties restored, saying that he does not need to return to those functions.

Father Cardenal later became a critic of the Sandinistas for what he believed was a distortion of their cause. He continues to condemn the actions of President Daniel Ortega and has been a fierce opponent of the government’s project to dig a channel across the country that would presumably compete with the Panama Canal.

“What would Sandino have done about the canal?” he asked the audience at the reading, referring to the revolutionary Augusto César Sandino, who fought the American Marines occupying Nicaragua in the 1920s.

Considered in the sweep of history, the collapse of Nicaragua’s revolution barely seems to give him pause.

“The Bible is full of revolutions. The prophets are people with a message of revolution,” he said. “Jesus of Nazareth takes the revolutionary message of the prophets. And we also will continue trying to change the world and make revolution. Those revolutions failed, but others will come.”

To close the public reading here, Father Cardenal chose an elegy for a young peasant revolutionary from Solentiname who was killed in battle. One of its final lines reads, “I would like to die like you, brother Laureano.”

Then he stood, raised his arms to applause and walked off the stage.

ELISABETH MALKINJAN. 2, 2015

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