Pope Francis has said that reading novels and poems is valuable in “one’s path to personal maturity” and should be encouraged in the training of future priests.

Novelists CS Lewis and Marcel Proust as well as poets TS Eliot and Paul Celan were quoted by the head of the Catholic church in a letter written on 17 July and published in eight languages on Sunday.

In the letter, Francis revealed his personal literary tastes. “I, for my part, love the tragedians, because we can all embrace their works as our own, as expressions of our own personal drama,” he wrote. “In weeping for the fate of their characters, we are essentially weeping for ourselves, for our own emptiness, shortcomings and loneliness.”

Francis said that literature is often thought of as a “minor art” – merely a form of entertainment – and considered unnecessary for the education of future priests. He called this approach “unhealthy”, adding that it can lead to the “serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment” of priests and calling for a “radical change of course”.

He appreciates that “at least some” seminaries have responded to “the obsession with ‘screens’ and with toxic, superficial and violent fake news” by devoting attention to literature.

Between 1964 and 1965, when Francis was 28, he taught literature at a Jesuit school in Santa Fe, Argentina. “I taught the last two years of high school and had to ensure that my pupils studied El Cid,” he wrote. “The students were not happy; they used to ask if they could read García Lorca instead. So I decided that they could read El Cid at home, and during the lessons I would discuss the authors the students liked best”.

He wrote that there is “nothing more counterproductive” than reading something out of a “sense of duty”, making “considerable effort simply because others have said it is essential”.

The letter mentions a number of benefits of reading, including increasing vocabulary, stimulating imagination and creativity, improving concentration, reducing cognitive decline and anxiety, and enabling the reader to prepare for and “deal with” a variety of situations. Francis also wrote that a good book “can provide an oasis that keeps us from other choices that are less wholesome”.

Another benefit of literature is that it lets us see life from the perspective of others, allowing readers to develop an “imaginative empathy”, he writes. “We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us! We immediately fall into self-isolation; we enter into a kind of ‘spiritual deafness’, which has a negative effect on our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with God, no matter how much theology or psychology we may have studied.”