José Tolentino de Mendonça, the cardinal who brought contemporary art back to the Vatican

For a long time, the dialogue between the Catholic Church and contemporary art remained sporadic, often tentative, and rarely central. The relationship never truly broke down, but it lost the prominence it had enjoyed for centuries, when artists were among the principal interpreters of the Christian imagination. David Hockney traced the beginning of this rift to the advent of the media. In recent years, this dialogue has regained its continuity and taken on new ambitions. The Vatican has returned to the Venice Biennale with a permanent presence and has opened a new space dedicated to contemporary art along Via della Conciliazione. But the novelty lies not merely in this commitment, which signals a presence and an interest. It is the way in which the Vatican has chosen to re-enter the contemporary discourse, not by seeking out artists called upon to represent the sacred or to confirm a doctrine, but by recognising contemporary artists as essential partners in dialogue. Not because they speak explicitly of God, but because they speak of humanity and of our times. At the heart of this renaissance is Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça.

This is the premise of our meeting; the reason, however, is a curiosity to understand the path that leads to such a choice. I would like to understand where this perspective stems from and the origins of this natural inclination to regard contemporary art not as a language to be directed, but as a voice to be listened to. I am therefore interested in discussing origins, journeys and those images that have remained true to him over time. The first question I put to him concerns his name. It is an almost formal question, perhaps unusual given its apparent obviousness, but it serves to emphasise the intention to start right from the beginning. His answer, however, immediately shifts the focus. “I inherited the name of a younger brother who died. It was a life lesson for me, because we live with others, for others, but also on behalf of others. I bear this name with the awareness that I carry not only myself, but something greater – which is my brother, but which ultimately is also a responsibility towards others. We live with it.” It is hard to imagine a better definition of his identity. The name, which normally distinguishes an individual, immediately becomes a shared responsibility. His biography does not begin with the self, but with another; it is a detail that might seem marginal but which, in fact, runs through the entire conversation. José Tolentino de Mendonça never really starts from himself; every individual memory spontaneously opens up to something broader, and every personal experience becomes a reflection on memory, education and history.

He was born in 1965 in Madeira, in the Portuguese Atlantic archipelago, where he remained for only a few months. His parents soon moved to Angola, then part of the Portuguese colonial empire. “I was lucky enough to spend my childhood in Africa,” he says, choosing the word ‘luck’. He speaks neither of exile nor of nostalgia. He speaks of a gift. When I ask him what his most vivid memories of those years are, I was expecting anecdotes, people, places. He replies differently: “It wasn’t because I was particularly sensitive. It was the things themselves that had the power to amaze.” A silence follows, then images begin to surface. A beach covered in fish freshly unloaded by fishermen. African markets with their interweaving of voices, colours and joy. Open-air cinemas, when the sunset transformed every screening into a collective experience and the world seemed to turn into a vast screen. The modernist architecture of Angola and Mozambique – white, luminous, set against a backdrop that still strikes him today, having recently returned there for the first time, as an immense promise. Nature and architecture coexist in his memory with equal intensity; he never distinguishes between what is built and what is natural. Both belong to the same landscape of wonder. It is not yet the memory of a cardinal; it is the vocabulary of a poet.

Whilst Africa taught him a sense of wonder, the voice that taught him to live within that wonder was his grandmother’s. “She was our library,” he says with a smile. There were few books in the house, but there was never any shortage of stories. His maternal grandmother had brought with her from Madeira a wealth of folk tales, legends, superstitions and myths from the Portuguese Atlantic. Every evening she would start them all over again, as if they belonged less to memory than to the present. Over time, however, he realises that what makes that memory extraordinary is not just her storytelling talent: “She had a greater ability to forge a connection with that land. It wasn’t based on colonialism, but on empathy.” It is a phrase spoken with such naturalness and one that contains, perhaps, one of the most profound reflections of the entire conversation. His grandmother lived in Angola without feeling she was the custodian of any cultural superiority. She listened, she acknowledged, she allowed herself to be transformed. For him, she represented “the literary centre, the imaginary centre, the magical centre of childhood”. He then tells me of an episode I had not anticipated, one that seems to have come straight out of a story by García Márquez. As a young girl in Madeira, his grandmother used to have visions. Like many people raised in the ‘Sebastianist’ tradition, she claimed to see King Sebastian’s return in the sea. After moving to Angola, those visions suddenly disappeared. It was a genuine source of grief. He remembers perfectly the day he saw her carefully preparing to go and speak to a priest about it, in an attempt to understand why she had stopped seeing these visions. Today, many years on, he interprets that episode in a completely different way; he does not speak of lost miracles. “She lived in a magical world and yet could no longer enter it. I think it was precisely the barrier of colonialism.” I’m struck by the way she always arrives at the same words without ever having to search for them: listening, relationship, trust. Even when recounting his own childhood, José Tolentino de Mendonça seems to be questioning not so much what he experienced as the way in which human beings inhabit the world of others. Perhaps this is where I begin to understand why, when talking about contemporary art, he so often uses the verb ‘to listen’.

Surprisingly, or perhaps simply by a twist of fate, in a household where tradition was almost entirely oral, his second great desire became a book. “The first object of desire is, of course, our mother. But I’d say that the second, in my life, was a book.” He cannot recall which one it was; indeed, it matters little. “Perhaps that book never existed. It’s a symbol.” What matters is not the possession of the book, but the desire it represents. “That’s how it is with books: desire isn’t satisfied, it expands.” Shortly afterwards, the family returned permanently to Madeira. For the child who had known only the two African seasons, autumn was a revelation. He recalls an exercise set by his teacher: the class went out into the school garden to collect leaves and write an essay. He came back with the wrong leaf. “It was my first autumn,” he says, almost amused. The memory does not dwell on the incident itself but focuses on the teacher. “She encouraged my writing.” He says this with a simple, almost childlike gratitude. They remain friends to this day. Throughout the conversation, there is never any suggestion of talent as an individual achievement. Every decisive turning point in his life bears the name of someone who recognised a potential in him before he did. At the age of eleven, he entered the seminary. It was here that the encounter took place which, listening to him, strikes me as decisive. The German and Austrian priests who had founded the seminary had also established the island’s Natural History Museum. They catalogued plants, collected minerals and classified insects. The boy who had arrived from Africa, steeped in his grandmother’s magical stories, suddenly found himself immersed in a completely different world. “It was like living inside a natural history archive.” This is perhaps the most accurate description of his upbringing. On the one hand, storytelling, myth and the oral tradition. On the other, the rigour of observation, inventory and classification. When I remind him of my fascination with the Natural History Museum in Vienna – with its endless nineteenth-century wooden display cases, ladybirds arranged according to the number of spots, and leaves collected side by side – the conversation lights up. “It was an initiation into the art of seeing.” He doesn’t say “looking”. He says “seeing”. Indeed, because there is so much talk about how to look at art in order to understand it, to study it meticulously whilst learning to grasp every detail, forgetting that one can look for hours without actually seeing anything. Then he adds a sentence that brings together everything he has told me up to that point. “The encounter between that oral world of my grandmother’s and of Africa, and the rigour of natural history that I found in the seminary… I think that was my initiation into poetry.” It is the first time the cardinal has uttered the word ‘poetry’. And, curiously, he does not link it to literature; he links it to a way of listening and seeing.

At this point, I realise that, in his life, encounters are never mere coincidences but a means of learning. When I ask him how the visual arts came to be part of his journey, he doesn’t tell me about an exhibition, a work of art or an artist he discovered as a boy. He replies with a sentence that could sum up the whole conversation. “We are the work of others.” He repeats it almost with gratitude. He says it was his friends who taught him to see, to make his way to an exhibition, to pause in front of a work of art. “To know,” he recalls, literally means ‘to be born with’. “My life is a succession of births, and I owe this to others, because they open doors for me.” I then think back to the start of our conversation. The brother after whom he was named, the grandmother who gave him his imagination, the teacher who recognised his talent for writing, the curators at the Natural History Museum. No stage of his development took place in isolation; each time, someone opened a door for him. Perhaps that is why, when I ask him if there is a single figure who played a decisive role in his relationship with art, after a brief hesitation he utters just one name: Lourdes Castro. He speaks of her with rare tenderness. “She was a nurturer of my soul.” It is a surprising description. Not a teacher, not a guide, but a nurturer. Someone who looks after something destined to grow. Lourdes Castro had lived in Paris, founded the magazine KWY, made her mark on the international scene, before choosing to return to Madeira. But what strikes him most is not her career but her sublime inability to draw distinctions. “For her, it was natural to talk about theology, botany, natural history and art.” José Tolentino de Mendonça speaks of her garden as he would speak of a work of art (or, perhaps, he speaks of the work of art as he would speak of a garden). The shadows, the herbariums, the artists’ books, the plants and the blades of grass all belong to the same universe. At one point, he recalls a phrase she often repeated to him. “Perhaps ‘art’ is the wrong name for it. The important thing is to do it well.” He adds nothing more. Nor do I feel the need to add anything.

From that moment on, the conversation takes yet another turn. I’d expected him to talk about painting. Instead, he starts talking about cinema. He smiles. “For me, cinema was the first art form.” Even before books, even before museums, there were the open-air cinemas in Angola. “Cinema was the people’s art of the twentieth century.” Then he adds, almost under his breath: “But cinema already contains everything. There’s photography. There’s literature. There’s music. It’s a total art form.” I realise then that his way of looking at contemporary art also stems from this. He doesn’t see disciplines. He doesn’t seek out categories. He picks up on languages that continue to speak to one another. Many years later, he arrives in Rome and speaks of it as one would speak of a person, not a city. “Rome makes us feel mortal,” he says, then smiles as he recalls Rilke complaining that in Rome nothing ever seemed to truly happen for the first time. And immediately afterwards he quotes Ovid, Martial, the Portuguese architects, Bernini. In José Tolentino de Mendonça, the eras coexist naturally, as if they were part of the same conversation. What Rome teaches him is not monumentality but time. “It is a city that helps us to reflect on what remains, what disappears, memory, and anticipation.” Walking through it, he says, one realises that we are “temporary tenants”. Perhaps this is also why, when he speaks today of the encounter between the Church and contemporary art, he carefully avoids words such as strategy, communication or consensus. He speaks almost exclusively of listening. I ask him what the Vatican’s role is today in its relationship with contemporary art. The answer is surprisingly simple. “We are not looking for artists who are easy to work with. We are looking for genuine artists,” and he recalls Paul VI’s address to artists. “The Church has asked for forgiveness because, for too long, it imposed models and failed to recognise their creative freedom.”

As I listen to him, I realise that the thread of our conversation has slowly come full circle. The man who regards artists as essential interlocutors is the same child who did not attribute the capacity for wonder to himself, but to things; the same boy who learnt to see by classifying a leaf; and the same man who says he has become what he is thanks to others. Nothing in his journey seems to stem from an individual achievement. Everything stems from an encounter. As we say our goodbyes, I ask him one final question: which, of all things, is humanity’s greatest invention? He does not mention fire, the wheel or the printing press. He replies without hesitation, ‘The word.’ Reflecting on the time we spent together, his answer comes as no surprise to me.

“It is humanity’s greatest invention, and it always goes hand in hand with listening.” When he speaks, he never gives the impression of trying to persuade anyone. For José Tolentino de Mendonça, words are not meant to explain the world. They are meant to inhabit it.