Fr Cardenal died on March 1 after a brief hospitalization.

His wake will be at the Mount of Olives funeral home, and a funeral Mass was said on March 3 Managua’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral.

Fr Cardenal was born on Jan. 20, 1925 in Granada, Nicaragua. He studied literature and was for a time at the Trappist’s Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, but he returned to Nicaragua and was ordained a priest in 1965.

The following year he founded an artists colony on an archipelago in Lake Nicaragua.

When the Sandinista National Liberation Front ousted Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Fr Cardenal was named Minister of Culture in the new government.

He added: “The Bible is full of revolutions. The prophets are people with a message of revolution. 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.”