Vatican cardinal’s poems published in Italian
July 14, 2026
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CWN Editor's Note: Crocetti Editore, a publisher in Milan, released La Lingua Primitiva, an Italian translation of two Portuguese books of poetry by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education.
According to the publisher, the prelate “reconstructs in a non-narrative form, not confessionally autobiographical but imaginatively lyrical, some moments of his African childhood, with the discovery of a land full of death but larger than life; a gallery of familiar figures of moving intensity; epiphanies associated with bewildered and disorienting contexts, in which everyday life is broken by an unexpected visitation that transfigures the known into the unknown, knowledge into enigma.”
“The power of this poetry lies also in its ability to bind the concrete to the intangible, uniting the visible and the invisible, gesture and thought, voice and feeling, the human and the divine,” according to the Vatican newspaper’s favorable review of the book, published in its July 12 edition.
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