José Tolentino de Mendonça (60) is a poet. Winner of more than a dozen literary awards, he has more than 40 books to his name, among which stands out A Noite Abre Meus Olhos. “He is the best current poet in my language, he would deserve the Nobel Prize,” wrote Javier Cercas, quoting the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mae in his book about Pope Francis’s trip to Mongolia, The Madman of God at the End of the World.
But José Tolentino de Mendonça is also a cardinal. And not just any. He is currently prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, where he was appointed by Pope Francis in a meteoric rise. From being a “simple priest,” as he himself told the Argentine Pope when he asked him in 2018 to preach to the cardinals in the traditional rite before Holy Week in Rome, he went on to receive the cardinal’s biretta a year later and later participate in the election of Leo XIV.
When asked, however, how he defines himself, whether as a poet-cardinal or a cardinal-poet, he does not hesitate. “I am a cardinal, a priest, a man of the Church, and I live my vocation, but it happens that this man of the Church is also a poet, also a writer, also a professor, which I have been all my life. And I believe these are not different things, each person is the synthesis of what the person is.”
And from that synthesis, Cardinal Tolentino has promoted a series of initiatives to promote art and culture under the auspices of the Vatican, as a way to respond to the challenges of current times, with artificial intelligence involved. Last year he created Conciliazione 5, an art gallery on the traditional Via della Conciliazione in Rome, in an unprecedented initiative. And this year he launched an Art Triennial, together with several Catholic universities around the world, as a space to respond to current challenges.
The project involves the Catholic University, which inaugurated last Thursday the Chilean version of the exhibition at the MAVI UC Museum of Visual Arts, which will also take place in Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Boston, Milan, Lisbon, and Luanda. An initiative that, according to rector Juan Carlos de la Llera, “invites dialogue with society based on questions that do not have simple answers: What does it mean to be empathetic and how can we be more so with each other? What bridges must we build to face together the challenges of our time?”
“The goal,” says De la Llera, “is precisely to open that conversation” and to remember that “in a world marked by enormous technological transformations, we still have the deeply human capacity to connect with others, to create.”
On these dilemmas and the relationship between art, culture, and accelerated technological changes, Cardinal Tolentino spoke with La Tercera from Rome.
Why does the Vatican, through the Dicastery you lead, decide to promote an initiative on contemporary art?
Art is a language that allows us to go to the heart of the human experience and more immediately identify the great questions, the feeling of our time. And it is a universal language because it is a symbolic language. While our languages naturally have their limits, artistic language has a universality, it reaches everyone, it is cross-border, it passes from one place to another. That is why it is a privileged language to help communication, but not utilitarian communication, rather of values, dreams, desires, and also wounds, sufferings. Art makes us a kind of communicating vessels, which is why it is a privileged language to put human groups in communication. On the other hand, in the Dicastery for Culture and Education we are responsible for this aspect of the Church’s mission, and one of our intuitions was that it would be important to bring contemporary art to unexpected places.
But isn’t this relationship between the Catholic Church and contemporary art usual?
The mission of the Church is to bring the Gospel in the service of the human person. This is not done in an abstract way, it is done in concrete and embodied languages, which can give a dimension of the world, of reality to the proposal of the Gospel always translated into new languages. This proposal is also a proposal to serve the human person, to serve societies, announcing in empathy a challenge of love for neighbor, love for our fellow human beings. And it must be done in a language that today can be relevant. For the Church the priority is the human being, it is to touch the heart of the human being with good news of happiness and this involves us in reality. That is why, for example, the Church has universities. We can say that education is not the priority of the Church, science is not the priority, but on the contrary, it is. Everything that is human interests us. There is not only art, but one cannot exist without art and without the other dimensions of the human.
The initiative has been linked to the Pope’s encyclical on artificial intelligence. Do you think art is a response to the risks and challenges posed by AI?
The subtitle of the encyclical is interesting: “The custody of the human person in the time of AI.” It is true that artificial intelligence is a very important topic in Magnifica Humanitas, but the issue is the human in the digital age. The digital age is this era we are living in, just as we lived the Renaissance in the past, we lived Modernity, now we are in the digital age. So the Pope Leo’s encyclical makes us all responsible to think about the human in its various expressions and in this era we are living. How to develop our humanity? How to guard humanity within us in a time of invasive technology, where technology seems like a panacea, a magical solution for all things? How not to sacrifice the human element to the development of technological progress? And that is why I think art is a very important observatory. Artists have here a role of great social impact, because they are like antennas of the human, and sometimes the more fragile human. They help give voice and image to what is not immediately seen or heard, which is the submerged feeling of our time. Art is a great antenna.
You are a poet and art has often been provocative, but that does not seem typical of the Catholic Church, which is rather conservative. How do these two views coexist?
I think we must abandon clichés. A cliché is that the Church by its nature is conservative. It is true that the Church is called to conserve its tradition. The Church is called to conserve, but also to innovate, to be prophetic. The Pope, in the first part of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, speaks of the social doctrine of the Church. A very important contribution that Christianity and the Catholic Church give to the social vision of the world. So all these are new ideas, contributions. We must get out of the cliché of saying that the Church is not interested in new ideas. No, the Church is very interested in the new and we must also get out of the cliché of saying that art is only interested in provocation. No, contemporary art lives in permanent dialogue with ancient art. Art is not only synchronic, it is also diachronic. Let’s say that without Byzantine art contemporary art is not understood. Sometimes it seems we are seeing things for the first time, but in reality there is a thread of continuity in the history of art that is indispensable to cite and understand also to grasp the scope of the gestures that contemporary artists make today. For example, in the Holy See pavilion at the Venice Biennale we chose the figure of a woman, a medieval saint as a proposal for artists like Patti Smith, Brian Eno, Alexander Kluge, Raúl Zurita, to establish a dialogue, a dialogue between the present and the medieval world. And I must say that Raúl Zurita is exemplary, because being one of the great poetic voices of contemporaneity, he lives in permanent dialogue with the roots of Hispanic poetry, but also of the Western canon. What Zurita does is ultimately a transition, a movement that we recognize a lot in contemporary art. That is why we must go beyond these hasty categorizations we make that artists are provocateurs and men of the Church are the conservation of the past. We must be open to see the depth that each reality carries.
I wanted to return to artificial intelligence and the dangers you see in it. Do you think it is a threat to the human being?
It is a huge opportunity, because it really opens new possibilities and certainly in many fields it will be a help, a huge development and will open a magnificent new world for us. However, the transformation that artificial intelligence brings is so great that it can get out of human control. And the human being needs education to be able to use this fascinating and grand tool well and at the same time terrible or that can be terrible. For the first time in history, because we are all connected, we can live a transformation that has an impact not only on our institutions but also on concrete people and their way of being. The Pope is not against artificial intelligence. He says we need to disarm artificial intelligence and prevent it from becoming a weapon against man. It must be an instrument that helps progress find new solutions. It is a matter of truly having control, that artificial intelligence is not a weapon to worsen inequalities, not a power in the hands of a few, but a shared good at the service of all humanity. We need to talk about artificial intelligence not in a technical way, but about the human consequences of this epochal change.
Do you think there is a danger that the idea will be established that the Church is against artificial intelligence?
No, because you cannot be against something that marks the time. No, you cannot be, for example, against writing. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates said that in the transition from oral society to the society of writing one had to be careful, because many things could be lost. He said, for example, that with writing men would become lazy and would not keep great knowledge in memory. Undoubtedly, something is lost in the transition of devices. The transition from a traditional or mechanical writing society to artificial intelligence is a radical change of era, but you cannot be against different eras, because, as the encyclical says, artificial intelligence is also an expression of human genius that creates these devices that are truly wonderful. The issue is the responsibility to use them well.
You participated in the conclave, were you surprised by the election of Pope Leo? How is your relationship with him?
I am a collaborator of Pope Leo, I am at his service, at the service of his mission, and for me it is a great privilege to be able to collaborate with him. I think we have a great Pope and time will help to know him more and more. The Holy Spirit guided the cardinals very well to choose Cardinal Prevost. In this first year of his pontificate everyone has better understood the choice. Today it seems a very natural choice and that is excellent.
Some see him as a counterbalance to figures like Donald Trump. Do you share this view?
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Pope Leo is the vicar of Christ. And the successor of Peter, and he will always be.
