A cardinal touted as the next pope has said that while some Christians are being martyred for their faith, some in the West are trying to water down the Gospel.
Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah said this in a book length interview “Dieu ou Rien” (God or Nothing) published in France last month.
Italian Vatican commentator Sandro Magister has suggested that Cardinal Sarah might be in the conversation as to who could be the next Pope, after Pope Francis.
Cardinal Sarah was appointed prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments by Pope Francis in November.
The African cardinal stated in the interview that “the martyrs are the sign that God is alive and still present among us”.
“[But] while Christians are dying for their faith and for their fidelity to Jesus, in the West there are churchmen who are seeking to reduce the demands of the Gospel to a minimum”.
The former secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples was especially critical of responses at last year’s extraordinary synod on the family.
Cardinal Sarah stated that “while hundreds of thousands of Christians live every day in bodily fear, some want to prevent suffering for the divorced and remarried, who are said to feel discriminated against in being excluded from sacramental communion”.
Cardinal Sarah vowed that the “Church of Africa will firmly oppose any rebellion against the teaching of Jesus and of the magisterium”.
He also questioned the approach by some at the extraordinary synod regarding pastoral practice towards homosexual people.
“In reality, the true scandal is not the existence of sinners, since mercy and forgiveness always exist for them, but rather the confusion between good and evil that it made by Catholic pastors,” the cardinal said.
He warned that if pastors are “no longer capable of understanding the radical nature of the Gospel”, then that leads to an absence of true mercy.
Cardinal Sarah also noted that the Church can “no longer hold back from a practical reflection on subjectivism as the root of most of the current errors”.
Sources
- L’Espresso
- Image: VisionGuinee