SANCTIFYING OFFICE

Approach to the Liturgy

Robert Cardinal Sarah possesses great admiration for the piety and liturgical devotion of the Holy Ghost Missionaries, who evangelized his village in Guinea.¹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing. He maintains this deep gratitude for the missionary work that converted many of his people alongside his profound love for traditional virtues present in his culture. Sarah writes: “As an African I certainly inherited our joyful fear of everything sacred.”²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51. Sarah displays a characteristically subtle attitude toward the pagan traditions of his forefathers, for he appreciates some genuine human religious insights in those traditions even as he condemns surviving superstitious practices.³Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 226, 21. In relation to interreligious dialogue, he asserts that “there is only one truth that must be sought, attained and proclaimed: it is Jesus Christ.”⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 139.

Sarah says that the spirit of this age is to be peculiarly inimical to a true liturgical sense. “The best example of this is when we create new liturgies, the result of more or less artistic experiments, that do not allow any encounter with God.”⁵Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125. In answer to the question “Some people are alarmed about a crisis of the liturgy in the Church. Are they right?” Sarah replied, “Alas I think they are right to be worried and to fear the worst.”⁶Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 275.

In 2017, on the tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI’s decree that fully liberalized the Traditional Latin Mass, Sarah gave arguably his most outspoken critique of liturgical practice in the Church today.

He criticized the “superficial spirit” of modern liturgies and the “disaster, the devastation and the schism that modern promoters of a living liturgy caused by remodeling the Church’s liturgy according to their ideas.” He added that “the serious crisis of faith” had “made us incapable of understanding the Eucharistic liturgy as a sacrifice,” and he lambasted a “sacrilegious tendency to reduce the Holy Mass to a simple convivial meal.” He criticized a “significant number of Church leaders” for underestimating the “serious crisis” in the Church, characterized by “relativism in doctrinal, moral and disciplinary teaching, grave abuses, the desacralization and trivialization of the Sacred Liturgy, a merely social and horizontal view of the Church’s mission.”

Rather than a “true springtime” since Vatican II, he said, a “growing number of Church leaders see this ‘springtime’ as a rejection, a renunciation of her centuries-old heritage, or even as a radical questioning of her past and Tradition.” He lamented that “many refuse to face up to the Church’s work of self-destruction through the deliberate demolition of her doctrinal, liturgical, moral and pastoral foundations.” And he singled out increasing numbers of “high-ranking prelates” who “stubbornly affirm obvious doctrinal, moral and liturgical errors that have been condemned a hundred times and work to demolish the little faith remaining in the people of God, while the bark of the Church furrows the stormy sea of this decadent world and the waves crash down on the ship, so that it is already filling with water.”

Sarah desires a unifying synthesis in the Roman Liturgy and believes a return to the text of the Second Vatican Council on the liturgy would resolve present disputes.⁷Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 131. Sarah’s general approach is captured in his’‘’ professed allegiance to the “reform of the reform,”although he has been officially criticized for using the phrase.⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125; Sarah, Power of Silence, 134.

In 2016, the cardinal gave a talk on authentically implementing Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy; in the talk, he reasserted that God, not man, is the center of the liturgy . He said the usus antiquior — the Extraordinary Form of the Mass — should be “an important part” of liturgical formation and that the Council never intended that the Roman Rite be “exclusively celebrated in the vernacular” but did call for greater uses of the readings. He said adoration must be at the heart of liturgical celebrations and that “kneeling at the consecration (unless I am sick) is essential.” He also reminded those attending that for a priest not to permit a member to kneel to receive Holy Communion is a “grave violation” of a basic Christian right. In short, Cardinal Sarah was keen to promote “the right way of celebrating the liturgy inwardly and outwardly” and in ways that he said were “utterly consistent with   the Second Vatican Council.”

Since his resignation as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, cardinal Sarah has spoken frequently on the centrality of God in the liturgy and in particular he has again questioned the “inculturation” of the liturgy in Africa.

In a homily delivered in the cathedral of the Senegalese capital, Dakar in December 2023, Cardinal Sarah criticized the “dismantling of the values of faith and piety” and the “destruction of the forms of the Mass” in the West. He added: “We are working to sprinkle African and Asian elements into the liturgy, thereby distorting the paschal mystery we celebrate. We place so much emphasis on these cultural elements that our celebrations sometimes last six hours,” he said. “Our liturgies are often too banal and noisy, too African and not Christian enough”.

With regard to covid restrictions on Catholic worship in many countries, Cardinal Sarah, while he was still at the head of the Congregation for Divine Worship, spoke abundantly about the liturgy and about the Mass — and of his shock at the closure of churches.

In September 2020 he published a Letter titled: “Let us return to the Eucharist with joy!” He wrote:

“However, as soon as circumstances permit, it is necessary and urgent to return to the normality of Christian life, which has the church building as its home and the celebration of the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, as ‘the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10). Aware that God never abandons the humanity he has created, and that even the hardest trials can bear fruits of grace, we have accepted the distance from the Lord’s altar as a time of Eucharistic fasting, useful in helping us rediscover its vital importance, beauty and immeasurable preciousness.(…) No live-streaming is equivalent to, or can replace, personal participation. In fact, such live-streams, in themselves, risk distancing us from a personal and intimate encounter with the incarnate God who gave himself to us not virtually, but in reality”.

In an interview with the French news site “Boulevard Voltaire” on November 2021, Cardinal Sarah stated:

“It’s absolutely mind-boggling and incomprehensible that for months on end, Masses were stopped and churches closed. In Italy, I saw the police come in and stop a Mass. These are attitudes not just against Christianity, but against God. They want to cut man off from God, but they won’t succeed. Christ said “I will be with you until the end of time.”

On January 23, 2023, Cardinal Sarah expanded on this theme in comments to Martina Pastorelli in the Italian journal La Verità:

“The pandemic was a test of our faith. We closed the churches and canceled human relations, only worrying about saving our own body, while the body needs nourishment in order to live. The sacraments put us in a personal and intimate relationship with God: the Eucharist gives us the life of Christ, allowing us to live truly as Christians sharing the same blood in Christ. We instead consented to remain without the Holy Mass for months, accepting the decisions of governments that are atheistic and indifferent to God: pretending to live in such a way is a great error.”

Ad Orientem

The cardinal maintains that the celebration of the Mass ad orientem, as the apostolic practice, is preferable, licit, and in conformity with the spirit and the letter of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council.⁹Sarah, Power of Silence, 133. The east has significance as the place where the sun rises, symbolizing the Resurrection of Christ and His Second Coming, and Masses used to be celebrated only in this way before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. He has stated‘’ that “as soon as we reach the moment when one addresses God — from the Offertory onwards — it is essential that the priest and faithful look together towards the East. This corresponds exactly to what the Council Fathers wanted.” Sarah has made such statements repeatedly. At the 2016 liturgy conference in London, he invited all priests to celebrate Mass ad orientem on the first Sunday of Advent that year, thereby ensuring that “in our celebrations, the Lord is truly at the center.” Sarah also held that, “contrary to what has sometimes been maintained, and quite in keeping with the conciliar Constitution, it is altogether appropriate, during the penitential rite, the singing of the Gloria, the orations and the Eucharistic prayer, that everyone, priest and faithful, turn together toward the East, so as to express their intention to participate in the work of worship and redemption accomplished by Christ.”

His appeal was met with a swift rebuttal from the Vatican that claimed that the cardinal’s words had been “misinterpreted,” that Pope Francis had made clear that facing east did not have to apply to the Ordinary Form of the Mass, and that “no new liturgical directives” had been foreseen for Advent. At the end of 2016, the membership of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (hereafter, “the Congregation”) was also significantly overhauled in a move widely perceived as a purge of those sympathetic to Cardinal Sarah’s perspective.

After issuing his appeal, the cardinal was pressured by at least one bishop to cancel a speaking engagement in the bishop’s diocese. He has also been occasionally deterred from speaking in other dioceses. He has never wished to make a spectacle of such restrictions, however, preferring instead to respect the bishops’ wishes and make no public statements.

In comments to Matteo Matzuzzi of the Italian daily Il Foglio in March 2021 following the acceptance of his resignation as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Sarah reiterated his support for ad orientem celebration of the Mass.

He said:

“Today in the Church, too often we act as if everything is a question of politics, power, influence and the unjustified imposition of a hermeneutic of Vatican II that totally breaks and is irreversibly at odds with Tradition. It has been a great suffering for me to witness these factional struggles. When I spoke of liturgical orientation and the sense of the sacred, I was told: ‘You are opposed to the Second Vatican Council’! This is false! I don’t believe that the struggle between progressives and conservatives has any meaning in the Church. These categories are political and ideological. The Church is not a field of political struggle. The only thing that counts is to seek God ever more deeply, to meet Him there and humbly kneel down to adore Him. (…) An extraordinary coincidence: on the very day of the announcement of my departure, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI sent me the French edition of his works on the liturgy. I saw in it an invitation from Providence to continue this work to restore a liturgy that puts God back at the heart of the life of the Church.”

Communion in the Hand

Cardinal Sarah has been outspoken in his criticisms of receiving Holy Communion in the hand, calling it a “diabolical attack” that is “trying to extinguish faith in the Eucharist by sowing errors and fostering an unsuitable way of receiving it.” In a preface to a book on the subject, he wrote that “truly the war between Michael and his Angels on one side, and Lucifer on the other, continues in the hearts of the faithful” and that Satan’s target “is the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence of Jesus in the consecrated Host.”

In 2017, Cardinal Sarah sought to limit the impact of new regulations from Pope Francis’ redirecting power of liturgical translations to bishops’ conferences by insisting that the 2001 document Liturgiam Authenticam. remains in force. For this he was publicly rebuked by the Pope.

Following the covid crisis, when access to public Masses was restored but many bishops were banning Communion directly in the mouth, Cardinal Sarah told Riccardo Cascioli for The Daily Compass (May 5, 2020): “There is already a rule in the Church and this must be respected: the faithful are free to receive Communion in the mouth or hand.”

The Power of Silence

Sarah’s highly acclaimed book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, is a profound reflection from a man who lives a deeply prayerful life. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote an afterword to the work, describing Cardinal Sarah as a “great spiritual teacher.” Because he is “a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands,” he wrote. Sarah’s attraction to monastic life, silence, and contemplation pervades his three-volume series.¹⁰Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51, 108, 209, 251, 261-62; Sarah, Power of Silence, passim. He writes that for a long time, “I thought about entering a Benedictine monastery.”¹¹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 53. When he became an ordinary, he went to some trouble to establish monasticism in his diocese.

Connected to his love of silence and contemplation is his disdain for some modern technology, particularly smartphones. “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” he wrote in The Power of Silence. And while he appreciates the convenience of a cell phone to read the Divine Office, he believes it is “not worthy” of the task as it “desacralizes prayer.” Such devices, he said, “are not instruments consecrated and reserved to God, but we use them for God and also for profane things! Electronic devices must be turned off, or better still they can be left behind at home when we come to worship God.”

Traditionis Custodes

Following the papal Motu proprio Traditionis Custodes of July 16, 2021, placing severe restrictions on what Pope Benedict XVI had called the “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite, Cardinal Sarah has continued to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass (in particular in the Czech Republic in September 2023).

In a lengthy article published in the Winter 2022 edition of Communio International Catholic Review under the title “The Inexhaustible Reality: Joseph Ratzinger and the Sacred Liturgy,” Cardinal Sarah wrote: “It is profoundly to be regretted that the motu proprio Traditionis custodes (July 16, 2021) and the related Responsa ad du­bia (December 4, 2021), perceived as acts of liturgical aggression by many, seem to have damaged this peace and may even pose a threat to the Church’s unity.

“If there is a revival of the post-con­ciliar ‘liturgy wars,’ or if people simply go elsewhere to find the older liturgy, these measures will have backfired badly,” he added. “It is too early to make a thorough assessment of the motivations behind them, or of their ultimate impact, but it is nevertheless diffi­cult to conclude that Pope Benedict XVI was wrong in asserting that the older liturgical forms ‘cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,’ particularly when their unfettered celebration has manifestly brought forth good fruits.”

In a footnote, he described some of these fruits: “I also can testify to this reality from many encounters with young people―lay men and women, religious, seminarians, and priests―whose vocations in the world either to Christian marriage or to the religious or the apostolic life are grounded in and nourished by the older liturgical forms in a truly life-giving way. In this respect, I can never forget my visit to the Paris-Chartres Pentecost pilgrimage in 2018: what hope these young people give to the Church of today and of the future!”

Marian Devotion

One of Cardinal Sarah’s recurrent themes in his spiritual teaching is the power and the need of silence, which he sees as profoundly linked to the example of the most perfect of creatures, the Virgin Mary. On August 15, 2023, he delivered the homily at the “pardon” (or Breton pilgrimage) of Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany for the feast of the Assumption; his words are a witness to his devotion to Mary as the one who leads Christians to her Son and to salvation:

“Mary is the silent Lady. It is this silence, which at the same time is a silence of acceptance of the word of God, this capacity to meditate on the mystery of Christ the Redeemer, that the Virgin Mary passes on to the Church as its mother. Mary teaches us to be silent. There are very few words spoken by Mary in the Gospels, and we need to learn silence from Mary. In a world full of noise, agitation and frenzy, with messages of all kinds clashing on social networks and often contradicting each other to the point of nausea, the witness and example of the Virgin Mary enable us to anchor our lives in the silence of contemplation and adoration that soothes our souls, while putting man in the presence of God, his creator and redeemer.”

Women and Intercommunion

Sarah has stated that the ordination of women is “an insurmountable obstacle” to “real progress” with the Anglicans.¹²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 136. He has ruled out female deacons, calling them an impossibility.

In his conference on the priesthood under the title “Joyful Servants of the Gospel,” given on July 3, 2023 at the Conciliar Seminary in Mexico City, he said: “No council, no synod, no ecclesiastical authority has the power to invent a female priesthood… without seriously damaging the perennial physiognomy of the priest, his sacramental identity, within the renewed ecclesiological vision of the Church, mystery, communion and mission.”

He has sought to avoid placing priests who do not accept the washing of women’s feet on Holy Thursday in conscientious difficulties. The Congregation, with his eventual approval, issued a decree on Pope Francis’ instruction allowing pastors to select for the washing of feet a small group that may (but not must) be made up of both men and women.

The cardinal rejects an ecumenism that ignores the importance of faith: “Intercommunion is not permitted between Catholics and non-Catholics. You must confess the Catholic Faith. A non-Catholic cannot receive Communion. That is very, very clear. It’s not a matter of following‘’’’ your conscience.” He disapproves of the excesses of “enculturated” African liturgies: “God is horrified by forms of ritualism in which man satisfies himself.”¹³Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 126.

As to his own personal sanctification, Cardinal Sarah has said that he prepares for spiritual battle by prayer and fasting — a discipline he learned when facing challenges as archbishop in Guinea. He decided at that time that every two months he would make a spiritual retreat in an isolated place and fast from food and water for three days. He would take with him only a Bible, a Mass kit, and a book of spiritual reading. The practice, he said, helped him to “recharge and return to the battle.”

Cardinal Sarah indeed invites all Christians to measure what is at stake in their lives and in the world. In his keynote address on June 26, 2023 at La Salle University in Mexico City on being “witnesses to the truth in a world in crisis,” he judged our time in a few sharp words: “Spiritually, men are bankrupt”. “Modern man has started a terrible war against God and against man: a satanic war. This is why the spiritual battle with evil is part of the Christian life,” he said, calling on the faithful to “retreat from the world and its illusions,” to “go to the desert… far from any distraction, to learn to discover ourselves and God, our dependence on Him, the heavy reality of our sin and our need for His grace and His mercy.”

GOVERNING OFFICE

As a Priest

Robert Sarah has recalled that when he was still a young priest, he was asked to run the minor seminary in Conakry. There he found that discipline had seriously broken down. He imposed a strict new regime that provoked hostility in the “almost a hundred” seminarians. An unknown arsonist set fire to the chapel. When the culprit did not come forward and was not identified by the other seminarians, Fr. Sarah closed down the seminary. He refused to reverse this decision despite the government’s insistence that he do so.¹⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 56-57.

As a Young Bishop

When he was made a bishop at the age of thirty-four, Sarah became the youngest bishop in the world. Cardinal Sarah emphasizes his feeling of inadequacy. He took as his motto Sufficit tibi gratia mea, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12:9) . He states that he sought to avoid elevation to the episcopate and nearly resigned his see.¹⁵Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 70. His twenty years as ordinary in Conakry, Guinea, nevertheless provided him extensive experience as a pastor of a vibrant local church.

Sarah manifests pride in his African identity and confidence in the future of African Catholicism: “How can anyone forget that Africa welcomed and saved the infant Jesus from the hands of Herod who wanted to kill him? How can we forget that the man who helped Christ to carry his Cross to Golgotha was an African, Simon of Cyrene?”¹⁶Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 91. He notes: “In Africa, the sacred is something quite obvious for the Christian people, but also for believers of all religions. Many Westerners look down on the sacred as something infantile and superstitious, but this disdain results from the self-importance of spoiled children.”¹⁷Sarah, Power of Silence, 120. While expressing confidence about the expansion of the Church in Asia and Africa, he cautions that “the beauty of the Church does not lie in the numbers of her faithful but in their holiness.”¹⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 75.

Cor Unum

Sarah worked tirelessly in his later capacity as president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum to promote practical charity and to care for the needy throughout the world. It was under this aegis that he assisted Benedict XVI in writing the Motu Proprio De Caritate Ministranda, “On the Service of Charity.” This legislation governs the Church’s charitable activities. Many consider the chief assertion in the document to be the following: “The service of charity is a constitutive element of the Church’s mission and an indispensable expression of her very being.” In continuity with this view, Sarah openly laments the growing institutional substitution of secularized philanthropy for authentic Christian charity: “Some Catholic organizations are ashamed and refuse to manifest their faith.”¹⁹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 80. Accordingly, the 2012 rule change stipulated that Cor Unum should monitor the activity of Caritas Internationalis, effectively putting Sarah in charge of the Catholic charitable activity then governed by Honduras’ Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga.

The position also gave a platform to criticize institutions pursuing ungodly agendas under the guise of humanitarianism. In 2012, then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told African nations to stop discrimination on account of sexual orientation or gender identity, even though such issues are taboo on most of the continent. In response, Cardinal Sarah described Ban’s comments as “stupid.” African bishops “must react” to such a move, he said, as “this is not our culture; it’s against our faith.”

Living under a Marxist Dictatorship

Cardinal Sarah seems to have been powerfully affected by the difficulty of living and exercising great spiritual authority under a cruel dictator. For six “terrible years,” Sarah served as bishop of Conakry during the regime of the communist-inspired Ahmed Sékou Touré. Under Touré’s direction, all the Church’s social works were confiscated and nationalized — schools, medical dispensaries, youth movements, goods of the Church. At the same time, all European missionaries were expelled from Guinea.²⁰Gérard Vieira, L’Église catholique en Guinée à l’épreuve de Sékou Touré, 1958-1984, History of the Catholic Church in Guinea, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1984), 4. Sarah is thus keenly aware of how to combat dictatorial regimes and when to maintain a prudent silence while saying enough to avoid complicity with them; indeed, the choice of his book’s title, The Power of Silence, seems to be influenced by a history of the Catholic Church in Guinea under the regime of Touré.²¹See the chapter about the Diocese of Conakry under the dictatorial regime of Ahmed Sékou Touré, “L’Église du Silence (1970-1984),” in Vieira, L’Église catholique en Guinée; see also Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 66-68.

At the same time, Sarah has not been afraid to condemn systems and policies contrary to Christ’s teaching. John Allen reports:

When Pope John Paul II visited Guinea in 1992, Sarah publicly asked the pope to push African leaders to clean up their act. “Tell the African governments that reforms will be meaningless if they are tainted in blood, provoking considerable human and economic catastrophes,” Sarah told the pope.

When leaving Guinea in 2001 to take up his new position as secretary for the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples in Rome, Sarah used the opportunity to decry the government of dictator Lansana Conté. In his prophetic address, Sarah said that Conté’s administration was “built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the’’’’ poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic.”²²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 73.

Cardinal Sarah has also expressed strong hostility to “egalitarian” ideologies: “The humility of the [missionary] faith was the strongest defense against the egalitarian aberrations of the revolutionary Marxist ideology of the State Party in Guinea.”²³Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 37. At the 2015 Synod on the Family, Cardinal Sarah compared radical Islam and gender ideology to “two apocalyptic beasts,” saying “we are not contending against creatures of flesh and blood” and observing that “what Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion Ideologies and Islamic Fanaticism are today.”The cardinal has also criticized “the great drift,” which began when “Catholic intellectuals began to write or say ‘green light for abortion’ and ‘green light for euthanasia.’” Both abortion and euthanasia have led to the “destruction of the natural institutions of marriage and the family.”

Indeed, Sarah describes these evils in nearly apocalyptic terms. He sees much of this harmful activity as the latest iteration of colonialism. It is not mere indigenous decadence. It is “a dictatorship of horror, a programmed Genocide of which the Western powers are guilty.”²⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 161. In light of evils perpetuated by forces in the West, Sarah states, “I think that the immense economic, military, technological, and media influence of a godless West could be a disaster for the world. If the West does not convert to Christ, it could end up making the whole world pagan.”²⁵Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 161.

While serving as bishop of Conakry, Robert Sarah participated in the great assemblies of African religious and bishops, helping guide them as president of the Guinean bishops’ conference as well as of the Episcopal Conference of West Africa. Through these positions, he came to work with German Catholic donors who wanted to assist the Church in Africa.²⁶See, for example, Vieira, L’Église catholique en Guinée, 419. Having in this instance witnessed the faith of Christian Europe firsthand, Sarah denounced the European Union as having turned away from the source of authentic rights in God and in the gospel in favor of secular abstractions.

General Governance Abilities

Cardinal Sarah is widely seen as a potential occupant of the See of Rome, someone who would symbolically express the phenomenal growth and dynamism of Catholicism outside the West. From a variety of sources, a picture emerges of Cardinal Sarah as a prelate with a deep prayer life. He is known to spend several hours a day in his private chapel and also prays a great deal at night. Both a contemplative and an ascetic, Cardinal Sarah is known never to make a single decision without praying about it for a long time. His attitude toward work and life in general is very much ora et labora — prayer and work: he has great admiration for the contemplative life but loves the apostolic life, too, and wishes to be very much a contemplative living in the world. He keeps up to date with current affairs and likes to read newspapers.

Cardinal Sarah’s governance of the Congregation was based on an implicit trust in his colleagues. Questions were raised about his administrative skills and the fact that he was often absent, spending much time traveling or writing. But even if tending to other tasks, he had a reputation for taking his work at the Congregation and liturgical matters seriously. He did not like to make decisions alone and would consult others, listening closely to the advice he was given. He also had no problem delegating tasks. He was honest, expected others to be so as well, and treated everyone the same, whether laborers, students, poor persons, or heads of state.

Some criticize him for being naïve or at least appearing to be so, and this has led some to believe that he is a poor judge of character. But his supporters say this owes itself to a personal guilelessness and the simple fact that he does not understand meanness, cowardice, and betrayal. He simply cannot understand how they originate, despite having faced such a cruel dictatorship in Guinea. Much of this was learned when he took many risks to defend his people, and yet on a daily basis he is always surprised when he has to face a wicked situation. This is not naïveté, say some who know him, but rather due to a personal innate goodness that makes him a stranger to evil.

Some argue that, especially when it comes to putting his head above the parapet, criticizing or taking a stand against dubious actions of this pontificate, he can be too cautious and circumspect; others believe it to be wise and strategic.

TEACHING OFFICE

Biblical Studies

Cardinal Sarah’s intellectual formation reached its highest development in biblical studies. His doctoral thesis in biblical exegesis focused on proposing a “new critical examination of certain textual difficulties in the Masoretic text of the Book of Isaiah” that emphasized that copyists of the Hebrew text were completely faithful to the original text.²⁷Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 37. For Cardinal Sarah, one is required to show fidelity to the biblical text “so as not to manipulate it to fit historical, political or ideological circumstances, for the purpose of pleasing men and acquiring a reputation as a scholar or avant-garde theologian.”²⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 37. This statement provides evidence that Sarah recognizes the inerrancy of Scripture and the historicity of the Gospels. He expresses carefully phrased admiration for certain academics whom he encountered in the course of his studies at the Gregorian University in Rome, as well as at the Pontifical Institute for Biblical Studies — scholars such as Ignace de la Potterie, Stanislas Lyonnet, Etienne Vogt, and Albert Vanhoye.²⁹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 49.

Catechesis

 Arguably a bishop’s first duty is to teach his flock the true Catholic faith. On October 26, 2023 Cardinal Sarah was a member of the panel presenting Credo, Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s Compendium of the Catholic Faith to the Roman public. The following excerpts from his speech bear witness to the importance given by the cardinal to a Catechism that can offer the faithful clarity on matters of doctrine and morals in the present time:

“At this time of serious crisis in the Church, of confusion, and especially as all too often we hear so many discordant opinions coming from the mouths of so many high-ranking prelates on doctrinal and moral issues, and on the acceptance of ideologies that deny God and His teachings on the nature and mission of man, the publication of the book ‘Credo: Compendium of the Catholic Faith’ is an initiative of great importance, and it has come at the right time,” he said.

Quoting from his own Endorsement for the Compendium, he insisted:

“Utterly conscious of the duty received at his episcopal consecration faithfully to hand on intact that which he himself has received in the living tradition of the Church, in this Compendium Bishop Schneider invites all men and women of good will to deepen (and even, where necessary, to correct) their knowledge of Catholic doctrine. His clear and concise questions and responses facilitate this, whilst his assiduous notation of sources encourages a deeper exploration of the riches of the Faith.

“Whilst I am sure that this book will serve Bishop Schneider’s aim of coming to the aid of those little ones who are ‘who are hungry for the bread of right doctrine,’ it will also prove to be an important tool in the essential missionary work of evangelization and apologetics in announcing the Saving Truth of Jesus Christ in our world that so desperately needs it.”

He added: “Believing presupposes knowing, and knowing implies a commitment of reason to better know, internalize, teach, and transmit. (…) The deposit of faith continues to be a supernatural divine gift. But today, the crisis of the Church has entered a new phase: the crisis of the Magisterium.”

Evangelization

For Cardinal Sarah, the proper approach to evangelization is a love of the truth of Christ: “God is truth; through his Son, he intends to draw us towards his truth. Attachment to and love of the truth are the most authentic, the most righteous, and the noblest attitude that a man could ever want on this earth.”³⁰Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 244. Consequently, absolutely key to the re-evangelization of the neo-pagan West, which is an urgent task for the cardinal, is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “The entire doctrine of the Church is found in this document.” Behind it are the sources of the Faith: “the ancient tradition, [the] teaching and faith of the Catholic Church, which was revealed by the Lord, proclaimed by the apostles, and guarded by the Fathers. For upon this faith the Church is built, and if anyone were to lapse from it, he would no longer be Christian either in fact or name. But the faith is strengthened by way of the heart, through a personal encounter with the experience of Jesus. Every day we must once again choose Christ as our guide, our light and our hope.”³¹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 147. Because of Muslim rejection of Christ, he asserts that “with Islam there can be no theological dialogue,” although a modus vivendi has been and is occasionally possible in some contexts (such as his own Guinea).³²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 137.

Sarah critiques the “prevailing narrative” that comes from Protestantism and the Enlightenment, which “constantly seeks to present the idea of an outmoded, mediaeval church.”³³Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 157, 167. Because of the secular narrative, he states, “I think it is necessary to acquire the ability to come to terms with oneself as ‘intolerant’, in other words, to have the courage to tell someone else that what he does is bad or wrong. Then we will be able to take someone else’s criticism when it is meant to open our eyes to the truth.”³⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 133. His guiding lights for an integration between pagan and Christian thought are St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others who received Greek philosophy and baptized it with Christian revelation.³⁵Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 177. He also expresses his hope that Benedict XVI will one day be canonized and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church.³⁶Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 99.

Sexuality and Marriage

Regarding matters of sexuality and marriage, Sarah holds firmly to traditional Catholic practices and those of Africa in accord with natural law. He states, “African philosophy declares: ‘Man is nothing without woman, woman is nothing without man, and the two are nothing without a third element which is the child.’ Fundamentally, the African view of man is trinitarian. In each of us there is something divine; the Triune God dwells within us and imbues our whole being.”³⁷Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 163. According to the bishop of Antwerp, Cardinal Sarah blocked all discussion of new solutions for the “pastoral care of gay Catholics” in his group at the 2015 synod. Sarah has described attempts to separate doctrine from pastoral practice regarding marriage and the family as “a form of heresy” and “a dangerous, schizophrenic pathology.” He espouses the intellectual equality and marital freedom of women, and therefore, citing the prevalent objectification of women’s bodies and the growth of prostitution, he strongly rejects modern Western feminism: “the West falsely claims to champion and defend women’s rights.”³⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 117. He has also encouraged motherhood by stating that “it is important that women should be able to have a job that is compatible with motherhood.”³⁹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 158. In a 2018 homily to the Girl Guides of Europe, Cardinal Sarah championed Our Lady as the model for contemporary womanhood. Sarah stated that “in the hierarchy of holiness, it is precisely a woman, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, who is at the top. She precedes you on the path of holiness.”⁴⁰Equipe Communication Uigse-Fse, “Homily of Cardinal Sarah to the Guides of Europe in Paray-Le-Monial,” Fédération du Scoutisme Européen, 12 November 2018. He encouraged the Girl Guides to “listen to her; learn from her: in her lies the fully realized woman, in her lies the secret of true joy and peace.”⁴¹ Equipe Communication Uigse-Fse, “Homily of Cardinal Sarah.”

Following the publication of the highly controversial Declaration Fiducia supplicans of December 18, 2023 in favor of the blessing of “irregular couples,” including homosexual couples, Cardinal Sarah has positioned himself among its most outspoken adversaries, calling it a “heresy.” He wrote an in-depth critique of the document in a “Christmas Message” published on January 6, 2024, on the French-speaking religious information website diakonos.be.

Excerpts:

“Truth is the first mercy that Jesus offers to the sinner.” (…)

“Some media outlets claim that the Catholic Church encourages the blessing of same-sex unions. They are lying. Some bishops are doing the same, sowing doubt and scandal in souls of faith by claiming to bless homosexual unions as if they were legitimate, in conformity with the nature created by God, and as if they could lead to holiness and human happiness. All they do is breed error, scandal, doubt and disappointment. These bishops ignore or forget Jesus’ stern warning against those who scandalize the little ones. (…) A recent statement by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published with Pope Francis’ approval, has failed to correct these errors and do the work of truth. On the contrary, its lack of clarity has only amplified the turmoil in people’s hearts, and some have even seized on it to support their manipulative intent.”

Recalling the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n° 2357), he stated:

“Any pastoral approach that fails to recall this objective truth would be failing in the first work of mercy, which is the gift of truth.”(…)

“The Declaration Fiducia supplicans states that a blessing is (…) intended for people who ‘ask that all that is true, good and humanly valuable in their lives and relationships be invested, healed and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit’ (n. 31). But what is good, true and humanly valid in a homosexual relationship, defined by Sacred Scripture and Tradition as serious depravity and ‘intrinsically disordered’?” (…)

“I must thank the Episcopal Conferences which have already done this work of truth, in particular those of Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, etc., whose decisions and firm opposition to the Declaration Fiducia supplicans I share and make my own. Other national or regional Episcopal Conferences and individual bishops should be encouraged to do likewise. In so doing, we are not opposing Pope Francis, but firmly and radically opposing a heresy that seriously undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and Tradition.” (…)

“Allow me, therefore, not to lapse into futile quibbling about the meaning of the word blessing. It’s obvious that we can pray for the sinner, it’s obvious that we can ask God for his conversion. It’s obvious that we can bless the person who, little by little, turns to God to humbly ask for the grace of a true and radical change in his or her life. The Church’s prayer is not denied to anyone. But it can never be misused to legitimize sin, the structure of sin, or even the near occasion of sin.”

Humanae Vitae, Contraception, Communion for Divorced & Remarried

On Humanae Vitae, the cardinal observes that the “successor of Peter knew that he was faithful to the truth,” and, “this document was prophetic.”⁴²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 89, 157. In a recent address on Humanae Vitae, the cardinal described contraception as inherently evil because it destroys the truth of love and the human relationship.’’

On the question of Communion for the divorced and “remarried,” he cites paragraph 1650 of the Catechism and goes on to state, “Familiaris Consortio definitively sealed the teaching and discipline of the Church that are founded on Sacred Scripture. Today, I think we should stop discussing this question like disrespectful intellectuals, giving the impression of disputing the teaching of Jesus Christ and the Church.”⁴³Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 249. He wryly observes, “Many expect as something normal that God should pour out his mercy upon them while they remain in sin.”⁴⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 173. Sarah thus declares that he will “untiringly denounce” clerics who “consider God’s thinking about conjugal life to be an ‘evangelical ideal.’ Marriage is no longer a requirement willed by God, modelled and manifested in the nuptial bond between Christ and the Church.”⁴⁵Sarah, Power of Silence, 38.

Gender Ideology

Sarah calls gender ideology “a crude lie” and “nightmarish totalitarianism.”⁴⁶Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 130, 164. He insists: “A man will never become a woman, and she will never become a man, no matter what mutilations one or the other agrees to undergo.”⁴⁷Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 164. The Catholic alternative view of gender and sexuality is found in St. John Paul II’s moral teachings, including his Theology of the Body.⁴⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 157, 156. Regarding “gay marriage,” Sarah states, “we are departing from the moral history of mankind.”⁴⁹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 149. From these comments, it is clear that Sarah would oppose legalization of civil same-sex “marriage.” “The chief enemies of homosexual persons are the LGBT lobbies. It is a serious error to reduce an individual to his behavior, especially sexual behavior. Nature always ends up having    its revenge.”⁵⁰Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 160. The French popular movement against “gay marriage,” Manif pour tous, “offers an example of the necessary initiatives.   It was a manifestation of the spirit of Christianity.”⁵¹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 149. Furthermore, “the battle to preserve the roots of mankind is perhaps the greatest challenge that our world has faced since its origins.”⁵²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 166. He notes that “Western colonialism continues today in Africa and Asia, more vigorously and perversely through the imposition of a false morality and deceitful values.”⁵³Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 158. Accordingly, “in some African countries, ministries dedicated to gender theory have been created in exchange for economic aid!”⁵⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 159. Sarah therefore unequivocally condemns attempts by politicians “to make homosexuality the cornerstone of a new global ethic.”⁵⁵Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 164.

For Cardinal Sarah, gender ideology is clearly a consequence of the rejection of the law of God and the Christian faith. In his interview with Martina Pastorelli in La Verità (January 23, 2023), he commented:

“The stability of mankind is in the Cross, but this world is moving it out of the way because it wants constant instability and ambiguity. This is how we find ourselves without unmoving moral and doctrinal teachings, as well as an immensely grave anthropological crisis, which reaches the point where it no longer distinguishes between male and female.”

Priestly Celibacy

Regarding the sacrament of Holy Orders, the cardinal strongly opposes the relaxation of the discipline of priestly celibacy: “To detach celibacy from the priesthood by conferring the sacrament of the Order on married men  would have serious consequences, in fact, to definitively break with the Apostolic Tradition. We would to manufacture a priesthood according to our human dimension, but without perpetuating, without extending the priesthood of Christ, obedient, poor and chaste.”⁵⁶Although the cardinal has not expressly addressed the question of restricting same-sex-attracted men from entering the ministerial priesthood, his comments on priestly celibacy seem to point to his support of preventing same-sex-attracted men from entering the priesthood.

In January 2020, Cardinal Sarah wrote a book with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church, which upheld priestly celibacy and addressed the crisis in the priesthood. The timing of the book caused controversy, published just ahead of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on the Amazon synod, Querida Amazonia, which was expected to relax mandatory priestly celibacy in the Latin Rite in the Amazon region as a means of coping with priest shortages there. Many were concerned that the change, which was not later explicitly made in the document, would undermine priestly celibacy worldwide.

A controversy ensued, leading Benedict’s secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, to claim that Benedict had been involved in the book on false pretenses. Cardinal Sarah stressed that there was no misunderstanding but rather “sordid machinations” enacted by “opponents of the priesthood,” intent on diverting attention from the “content of the book.” He argued that the faithful did not want an end to celibacy, that he was “in no way in opposition to Pope Francis” and those who claimed he wanted to “divide the Church.”

Cardinal Sarah said in an interview shortly before the publication of Querida Amazonia that the priesthood was in “mortal danger” and called for better formation. He said the Church has been “overwhelmed by lukewarmness and mediocrity” and that “we must aspire to holiness.” The West, he said, is “out of breath” and “waits for priests who are radically saints.”

Furthermore, he stated, “The idea of a woman cardinal is as ridiculous as the idea of a priest who wanted to become a nun!” and “I understand‘’ what a big trap it would be to entrust a dicastery of the Roman government to a woman just because she is a woman.” ⁵⁷Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 118-19.

Cardinal Sarah’s traditional approach to the priesthood is certainly not a symptom of misogyny as his general favorable attitude towards women (as opposed to feminism) described above shows; instead, it is rooted in the configuration of the priest with Christ.

When he visited Cameroon in April 2024, he succinctly portrayed what the priest is or should be during his homily for the Ordination Mass of 12 new priests: “To be a priest is to become Jesus-Christ Himself. It is to extend His salvific presence among men; it is to strive, each day and every day, to bear in our bodies the sufferings and death of Jesus, and to radiate His presence in order to render to God His central and pre-eminent place in the world, because a world without God is a world without hope… To be a priest is the greatest gift that God has given humanity, because He makes us and helps us carry on the work of evangelization initiated by Jesus.”

During the same homily, Cardinal Sarah spoke once again about priestly celibacy: Because they are radically consecrated, offered and given to God, priests renounce marriage, family, material and financial gain. God alone is their only good, their only love, their only happiness, and their only inheritance”, he explained. Renouncing all power, all possessions and all family, “priests must imitate and embody the poverty of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, who had nowhere to lay his head, in order to choose God alone as their only riches.”

Decentralization of Doctrine

Cardinal Sarah strongly condemns the movement toward decentralizing the doctrinal authority of the Church. In the present situation, he says, “we would commit a grave sin against the unity of the Body of Christ and the doctrine of the Church by giving episcopal conferences any authority of decision-making ability concerning doctrinal, disciplinary, or moral questions.”⁵⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 111. Cardinal Sarah is also concerned at an academicization of the Faith. He says that “some have intellectualized and complicated the Christian message so much that a great number of people are no longer touched by or interested in the teaching of the Church.”⁵⁹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 114. Elsewhere: “The Gospel is not a theoretical path; it must not become a sort of school reserved for the elite. The Church is a plainly evident path to the risen Lord.”⁶⁰Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 145.

Of Pope Francis, he writes, “For my part, I do not believe that the Pope means to endanger the integrity of the Magisterium. Indeed, no one, not even the pope, can destroy or change Christ’s teaching. No one, not even the pope, can set pastoral ministry in opposition to doctrine. That would be to rebel against Jesus Christ and his teaching.”⁶¹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 246.

In a speech delivered in April 2024 to the students of the Saint-Cyprien Theological School in the Diocese of Obala, Cameroon, published in French by La Nef, Cardinal Sarah expands on his frequent criticism of a “West” that no longer wants to accept the universality of truth, presenting Africa as having a mission in this regard.

He said:

“The African academic world must be careful not to allow itself to be contaminated by the diseases of the mind that the West would like to impose on it. The West is afraid of the search for truth. For many Westerners, truth has become an unpronounceable term. If you speak of truth, you are accused of dogmatism, of oppression. But, in fact, behind these deceptive speeches hides the violence of the dictatorship of relativism, which itself is often the mask of unavowed financial and material interests. (…) The doctrinal reaction of African theologians to the recent questioning of Catholic teaching on sexuality is exemplary in this respect,” Sarah said. “No, despite what some have claimed, Africans have not reacted because of a cultural particularism that would make them allergic to homosexuality. No! Africans reacted because of their attachment to the universal and timeless truth.”

Migration

At a conference in Poland in 2017, Cardinal Sarah distinguished between genuine refugees and economic migrants and emphasized the right of Poland and countries like it to do the same despite the attempts of external forces to impose an indiscriminate policy upon them. His solution is to turn to Christ: “Christians will never succeed in overcoming the challenges of the world by appealing to political tools, human rights, or respect for religious liberty.”⁶²Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 194.

Cardinal Sarah, as an African, has often been asked questions by French media about the Church’s view on migration, the latter having often been promoted by the current Pope and the Vatican, including in the name of the right to seek for better economic circumstances. In a series of interviews with Boulevard Voltaire from 2016 to 2021, he explicitly warned against Europe losing its roots and being “invaded by other cultures”.

On November 26, 2021, he commented:

“It’s a mistake to promote immigration. It’s a triple betrayal of Africa and the Middle East, because it robs them of wealth, development potential, intellectual capacity and manpower. Secondly, we are not arresting the traffickers of human life, the smugglers who take hundreds and hundreds of people on board to drown them in the sea. This is a crime. Then, we make these people believe that by arriving here, they have reached El Dorado and paradise on earth. They’re stuck in a camp, they’re not welcome and they don’t have jobs. The West can’t take in everyone, so it’s a false idea to promote immigration. The Bible is often used to say that Jesus Christ emigrated to Egypt, but Jesus Christ emigrated because he was threatened by Herod, and then he went back home. The Jewish people were exiled several times to Mesopotamia, but they came back. People thrive in their own homes. If we really want to help these people, it’s not by taking them in, under inhumane conditions. Help them to develop at home, to be happy at home.”

View on Coronavirus

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cardinal Sarah said in an interview that the virus had dispelled the illusion of human self-sufficiency and an “all-powerful man” and that he hoped it would allow people to turn back to essentials, and rediscover God and prayer.

“This virus acted as a warning. In a matter of weeks, the great illusion of a material world that thought itself all-powerful seems to have collapsed. A few days ago, politicians were talking about growth, pensions, reducing unemployment. They were sure of themselves. And now a virus, a microscopic virus, has brought this world to its knees, a world that looks at itself, that pleases itself, drunk with self-satisfaction because it thought it was invulnerable.   I believe this epidemic has dispelled the smoke of illusion. The so-called all-powerful man appears in his raw reality. There he is naked. His weakness and vulnerability are glaring. Being confined to our homes will hopefully allow us to turn our attention back to the essentials, to rediscover the importance of our relationship with God, and thus the centrality of prayer in human existence. And, in the awareness of our fragility, to entrust ourselves to God and to his paternal mercy.“

In May 2020, Cardinal Sarah strongly criticized what he called “bizarre proposals” implemented in Germany and under consideration in Italy and elsewhere for “do-it-yourself” Communion, whereby consecrated hosts would be packaged in plastic bags so the faithful could take them away in order to avoid contagion. He said such a practice was “absolutely not possible,” and argued that the Eucharist “must be treated with faith.” God, he said, “deserves respect; you can’t put him in a bag.”

In the face of some parishes and dioceses in which both Communion and Confession had been suspended, Cardinal Sarah said “nobody has the right to stop” a priest from celebrating the sacraments, a duty that “must be respected.” The cardinal added that even if it is not possible to attend Masses, “the faithful can ask to be confessed and receive Communion.”

He also criticized a German bishop for not allowing Eucharistic assemblies, only the liturgy of the Word, saying it is “Protestantism.”

In May 2020, Cardinal Sarah was initially listed as one of over eighty signatories, including prelates, physicians, lawyers, and journalists, who put their name to an appeal expressing concern about global measures being implemented to stem the coronavirus pandemic, and calling for “inalienable rights of citizens and their fundamental freedoms” to be respected. He withdrew his name from the initiative on receiving advice that it was not appropriate for a senior curial official to sign such an appeal.

Atheism and the Decline of Western Civilization

 Cardinal Sarah frequently speaks of the decline of the West as linked to its atheism, and even identifies “practical atheism” within the Church itself.

On June 13, 2024, he spoke for nearly an hour in a crowded lecture hall at CUA’s Busch School of Business. His address was co-sponsored by the Napa Institute and the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. Speaking to American Catholics, he was not afraid to target president Joe Biden:

“You have a self-identified Catholic President who is an example of what Cardinal Gregory recently described as a ‘Cafeteria Catholic.’ Many of your Catholic public officials are in the same category. Many of your Catholic hospitals and universities are Catholic in name only. The minority status of so many things Catholic here in the United States, which provided an important witness to the fullness of our Catholic faith, has been traded for cultural assimilation.”

He went on to accuse certain parts of the Church of having “lost the concern of being a sign of contradiction,” saying:

“I believe that the Church of our time is experiencing the temptation of atheism. Not intellectual atheism. But this subtle and dangerous state of mind: fluid and practical atheism. (…) None of the proponents of this paradigm shift within the Church reject God outright but they treat Revelation as secondary, or at least on equal footing with experience and modern science. This is how practical atheism works. It does not deny God but functions as if God is not central. (…) The crisis is not so much the secular world and its evils, but the lack of faith within the Church.”

In a previous interview on November 26, 2021, with the French media outlet Boulevard Voltaire, Cardinal Sarah warned the West that it is committing suicide in rejecting Christendom and even prophesying its end.

He said:

“The West brought Christian civilization to Africa and to Asia. We were educated by this civilization, by the Europeans, and if they forsake this wealth and this legacy, that is a dream that will lead to the disappearance of the West. If Christendom disappears from its own culture, another culture will take its place. It will be an Islamic culture, a Buddhist culture, everything that is invading the West today. You welcome them with open arms, but you don’t give them your own riches. You take theirs, and I don’t know how you’re going to survive. (…) The greatest poverty is not to have no money, the greatest poverty of man is to lose his faith, not to have God as his support. Today, the West is the poorest continent, because God no longer exists and people no longer need Him.”

Synod on Synodality

 Cardinal Sarah was one of the five cardinals who, on August 21, 2023, sent a set of five questions or “Dubia” to Pope Francis to express their concerns and seek clarification on points of doctrine and discipline.

Sent ahead of the opening of the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican in October 2023, the cardinals requested clarity on topics relating to doctrinal development, the blessing of same-sex unions, the authority of the Synod on Synodality, women’s ordination, and sacramental absolution.

The same group of senior prelates said they had submitted a previous version of the “Dubia” on July 10, that received full answers rather than the customary form of “yes” and “no” replies, which made it necessary to submit a revised request for clarification. In a “Notification to Christ’s Faithful” dated October 2, the group said that they decided to submit the “Dubia” “in view of various declarations of highly placed prelates” made in relation to the upcoming synod that have been “openly contrary to the constant doctrine and discipline of the Church.” Those declarations, they said, “have generated and continue to generate great confusion and the falling into error among the faithful and other persons of goodwill, [and] have manifested our deepest concern to the Roman pontiff.” The Pope’s reply that was published almost immediately was in fact the series of answers addressed to the Cardinals’ first set of questions in July, which means no clarification has been forthcoming as to their concerns.

In a speech to the Bishops of Cameroon on April 9, 2024, published online by Vaticanist Sandro Magister under the title: “The Bishops of Africa, defenders of the unity of the faith”, Cardinal Sarah clearly presented himself as seeking to have influence on the synod’s second Roman session in October 2024:

“In the upcoming session of the synod, it is essential that African bishops speak in the name of unity of faith and not in the name of particular cultures. In the previous session, the Church of Africa strongly defended the dignity of man and woman created by God, but its voice was ignored and scorned by those whose only obsession is to please Western lobbies.

The Church of Africa will soon have to defend the truth of the priesthood and the unity of the faith. The Church of Africa is the voice of the poor, the simple and the small. It is up to her to proclaim the Word of God in the face of the Christians of the West who, because they are rich, believe themselves to be evolved, modern and wise in the wisdom of the world. But ‘what is foolishness of God is wiser than men’ (1 Cor. 1:25).⁶³Authorized English translation from https://www.permariam.com/p/full-text-cdl-sarahs-warning-call

During his Napa Institute speech on June 13, 2024, Cardinal Sarah warned:

“We are told that the Synod on Synodality is to bring the whole Church into dialogue. Perhaps this can be a path through which the Holy Spirit speaks to the Church. That would be a blessing.  There is concern, however, that this is not a path through which the sensus fidelium is exercised. There are voices at the Synod that are not speaking from within the sensus fidei. Just because someone identifies as Catholic does not mean they are part of the sensus fidelium. To be Catholic is more than a cultural identification; it is a profession of faith. It  has a particular content of faith. To move outside that content, both in belief and practice, is to move outside the faith. And it is a grave danger to consider all voices legitimate. This would lead to a cacophony of voices that amount to noise, which seems to be growing louder these days.”

CONGREGATION FOR DIVINE WORSHIP AND THE DISCIPLINE OF THE SACRAMENTS

Sarah was the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. He has a profound liturgical sensibility which he attributes, in part, to his African heritage, from which he derived “a joyful fear of everything sacred.”⁶⁴Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51. During seminary, Sarah came to understand that “the greatest way to be with the Son of God made man was still the liturgy.”⁶⁵Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51. Sarah’s deep piety and love for the liturgy can be summed up in the following quote: “The Mass is the most important thing in our lives.”⁶⁶Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51.

Cardinal Sarah has acknowledged the sad reality of “ideological pitched battles” over the liturgy and explained that “the lack of understanding between different ways of thinking about the liturgy can be explained by legitimate cultural factors, but nothing can justify its transformation into anathemas hurled by either side.”⁶⁷Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125. Sarah praised the good work and the fruits of the communities dedicated to the pre-conciliar forms of worship. “They’re not nostalgic or oppressed by the ecclesiastical battles of recent decades, they’re full of joy to live life with Christ amid the challenges of the modern world.” He also observed that the pre-conciliar missal was “never abrogated” and that it had been the Mass of “innumerable saints.”⁶⁸Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125.

At the same time, he seems to see a danger of Pharisaism in some liturgical traditionalism. For the cardinal, “if a person respects the ancient rite of the Church but is not in love, that individual is perishing . . . Strict, almost fundamentalist ritualism or the modernist-type deconstruction of the rite can cut people off from a true search for the love of God” ⁶⁹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125. Although he respects the pre–Vatican II liturgy, he dislikes the term “traditionalist” and told a conference held at the Angelicum to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum, “You do not belong in a box on the shelf or in a museum of curiosities. You are not traditionalists: you are Catholics of the Roman rite as am I and as is the Holy Father. You are not second-class or somehow peculiar members of the Catholic Church because of your life of worship and your spiritual practices.”

In regard to the concrete implementation of the liturgical reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council, particularly in his own diocese, Cardinal Sarah is overtly condemnatory of “the botched preparation for the liturgical reform,” which, he says, “had devastating effects on the Catholic population.”⁷⁰Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 84-85.  The cardinal wonders how “such a strange movement [could] produce in the life of the Church anything but great confusion among the people.”⁷¹Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 84-85. He states:

Certainly, the Second Vatican Council wished to promote greater active participation by the people of God and to bring about progress day by day in the Christian life of the faithful (see Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 1) Certainly, some fine initiatives were taken along these lines. However we cannot close our eyes to the disaster, the‘’ devastation and the schism that the modern promoters of a living liturgy caused by remodelling the Church’s liturgy according to their ideas.

Some have observed that despite Cardinal Sarah’s frequent pleas for a more reverent liturgy and an end to abuses, little has changed in that regard during his time as prefect of the Congregation. His effectiveness is said to have less to do with his governing abilities and more to do with serving a pontificate with a considerably different vision.

Now that Cardinal Sarah no longer has a leading role regarding the liturgy of the Church, Pope Francis, who had appointed him as head of the then-Congregation for Divine Worship, stated in a book-length interview, The Successor, with Spanish journalist Javier Martínez-Brocal that the appointment “may have been a mistake.”

“From there he was manipulated by separatist groups, but he is a good man,” the pontiff said. “At times I have the impression that working in the Roman Curia made him a little bitter.”

Cardinal Sarah’s supporters would likely disagree with the Pope’s evaluation. As a man of God known for his intense interior life, commitment to prayer and personal holiness, they would say that of all in the Vatican, he is probably among the least bitter of all.

• 1
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing.
• 2
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51.
• 3
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 226, 21.
• 4
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 139.
• 5
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125.
• 6
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 275.
• 7
  Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 131.
• 8
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125; Sarah, Power of Silence, 134.
• 9
  Sarah, Power of Silence, 133. The east has significance as the place where the sun rises, symbolizing the Resurrection of Christ and His Second Coming, and Masses used to be celebrated only in this way before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
• 10
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51, 108, 209, 251, 261-62; Sarah, Power of Silence, passim.
• 11
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 53.
• 12
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 136.
• 13
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 126.
• 14
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 56-57.
• 15
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 70.
• 16
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 91.
• 17
  Sarah, Power of Silence, 120.
• 18
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 75.
• 19
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 80.
• 20
  Gérard Vieira, L’Église catholique en Guinée à l’épreuve de Sékou Touré, 1958-1984, History of the Catholic Church in Guinea, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1984), 4.
• 21
  See the chapter about the Diocese of Conakry under the dictatorial regime of Ahmed Sékou Touré, “L’Église du Silence (1970-1984),” in Vieira, L’Église catholique en Guinée; see also Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 66-68.
• 22
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 73.
• 23
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 37.
• 24
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 161.
• 25
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 161.
• 26
  See, for example, Vieira, L’Église catholique en Guinée, 419.
• 27
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 37.
• 28
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 37. This statement provides evidence that Sarah recognizes the inerrancy of Scripture and the historicity of the Gospels.
• 29
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 49.
• 30
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 244.
• 31
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 147.
• 32
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 137.
• 33
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 157, 167.
• 34
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 133.
• 35
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 177.
• 36
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 99.
• 37
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 163.
• 38
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 117.
• 39
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 158.
• 40
  Equipe Communication Uigse-Fse, “Homily of Cardinal Sarah to the Guides of Europe in Paray-Le-Monial,” Fédération du Scoutisme Européen, 12 November 2018.
• 41
  Equipe Communication Uigse-Fse, “Homily of Cardinal Sarah.”
• 42
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 89, 157.
• 43
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 249.
• 44
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 173.
• 45
  Sarah, Power of Silence, 38.
• 46
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 130, 164.
• 47
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 164.
• 48
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 157, 156.
• 49
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 149. From these comments, it is clear that Sarah would oppose legalization of civil same-sex “marriage.”
• 50
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 160.
• 51
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 149.
• 52
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 166.
• 53
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 158.
• 54
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 159.
• 55
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 164.
• 56
  Although the cardinal has not expressly addressed the question of restricting same-sex-attracted men from entering the ministerial priesthood, his comments on priestly celibacy seem to point to his support of preventing same-sex-attracted men from entering the priesthood.
• 57
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 118-19.
• 58
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 111.
• 59
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 114.
• 60
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 145.
• 61
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 246.
• 62
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 194.
• 63
  Authorized English translation from https://www.permariam.com/p/full-text-cdl-sarahs-warning-call
• 64
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51.
• 65
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51.
• 66
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 51.
• 67
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125.
• 68
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125.
• 69
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 125.
• 70
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 84-85.
• 71
  Sarah and Diat, God or Nothing, 84-85.