During his decades as a public figure, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann — Nicaraguan politician, priest, and former president of the United Nations General Assembly — managed to escape much of the international notoriety visited upon his Sandinista comrades. But from the beginning of his political life to his death earlier this month, he was never far from the struggle.

D’Escoto, who died on June 8 from apparent stroke complications, was a lifelong proponent of a radical politics that once seemed to promise restoration for a battered and disoriented international left. He led a tripartite life — as a revolutionary, a priest, and a public servant — during a period of profound change in his home country, when an insurgent egalitarianism swept through popular consciousness to saturate both secular and Catholic worldviews.

Throughout the 1980s, grassroots movements pushed the struggle over the Catholic Church’s social mission out of the Vatican and into the glare of the Central American sun. As poor people’s movements in the Global South, particularly Latin America, repeatedly challenged elite power and wealth, some factions of Catholics broke with the church hierarchy to advance a radically transformed vision of Catholic social doctrine.