Religion

Cardinal Sarah Blasts Church Leadership In Searing Interview

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One of the Vatican’s most influential conservative power brokers had some strong words for fellow clergymen who embraced worldly values, globalism, and lenient attitudes on liturgical and doctrinal matters of the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Robert Sarah spoke in a wide-ranging discussion published in his native French on March 27 about the evils within the modern Catholic Church, which he pegged squarely on its leadership.

“Today, I can say without fear that some priests, some bishops and even some cardinals are afraid to proclaim what God teaches and to hand on the doctrine of the Church,” Sarah told the conservative European magazine Valeurs actuelles.

He went on to criticize how so many senior churchmen are “literally spellbound by political or social questions.” “Christ is the only light of the world. How could the Church turn away from this light? How can she spend her time getting bogged down in purely materialistic issues?” he said.

Sarah also critiqued an overemphasis by senior prelates on the topic of immigration and called on displaced migrants to put their own homes in order instead of fleeing to foreign lands.

“But why do they go away from their land? Because their nations have been destabilized by unbelieving authorities who have lost God, for whom money and power are the only things that count,” Sarah said, adding, “These difficulties are immense. But, I repeat, the Church must first restore to people the ability to look toward Christ: ‘When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself.'”

This position puts him at odds with Pope Francis, who has made it a mission to prioritize the interests of migrants and refugees throughout his papacy. “Some have adopted the ideologies of today’s world under the fallacious pretext of being open to the world; but instead we should bring the world to be open to God, who is the source of our existence,” he said.

Sarah also warned about the “collapse of the faith,” poor priestly formation in seminaries and liturgical malpractices, which he described as a “crisis.”

On the subject of priestly sex abuse and pedophilia, Sarah said, “There are men of the Church, some of them high-ranking, who have tarnished the Church, disfigured the face of Christ, but Judas must not lead us to reject all the apostles.”

These remarks, which neither reference Francis nor any of his cardinal associates by name, represent the most scorching indictment to date by the cardinal. Sarah was appointed in 2014 by Francis as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and has remained largely silent in public, even authoring a book on silence in 2017.

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